Leadership through Inspiration - Simon Sinek

I'm so delighted to be at the Aspen ideas festival every year it seems like it gets better the the leadership of the Aspen Institute it's done done a wonderful job helping all of really the country in the world to understand the power of ideas you know we're in a world that's that's buffeted by the constant weather of politics it's very important to remember that more important in the weather of politics is the climate of ideas I learned once from a physicist that the biggest mistake you can make as a PhD physicist is mistaking the climate for the weather the Aspen ideas festival doesn't do that congratulations on participating in in it and and thank you for being here at this session which I've been so excited about because I get to talk to my friend simon Sinek you if you're here it's because you know who simon Sinek is he's a best-selling author he is a consultant to some of the most important organizations in the world and he's an all-around purveyor of the ideas that can lift people up he's a humanist he was born in the UK and he's lived in South Africa in Hong Kong and most exotically in New Jersey he attended Brandeis University in the City University of London he got his start in the world of marketing and advertising he had his own firm cineq partners and and his understanding of leadership comes from his own nicked experiences leading that firm that's not how you know him however many of you became familiar with simon Sinek all suddenly in 2009 where he had his breakout moment now actually nobody has a breakout moment when you look at a rock band that suddenly breaks out on the scene it turns out that they've been touring for 16 years before that but everybody learned about them because they became very viral for whatever reasons that happened to Simon in 2009 when he had a TED talk how great leaders inspire action which is a third most watched TED talk of all time with 32 million views and it was aligned with his first best-selling book start with why we're going to talk about that here in a second since then he's had more bestsellers of course leaders eat last why some teams pull together and others don't which I recommend very highly to you for a four year interest you won't be disappointed and 20:16 together is better a little book of inspiration his next book which is coming out September is fine gear Y which takes which which which talks about start with Y but how to do it which is really important and and we're going to talk a little bit later about a very exciting new project that he's working on it's in beta form and I can't wait to learn more about it I can't wait for you to learn more about it - we're going to take a few minutes and have a conversation I'm going to ask them some questions we're going to discuss issues around leadership that the country needs that the world needs that business lee needs that families need that that we all need and then you get to interview them up to that in the back half of this hour so welcome simon Sinek thank you nice to see you hey when when Aston invited me to come and do this they said who would you like to interview you and they gave me sort of a list of all these famous journalists and things I said no I want Arthur Brooks because because because he's the best I get to hang out here with my friends that's great thank you Thank You Simon um the last time we were together was under really funny circumstances when the many of you saw in the news right after the election in January the Republicans all the House Republicans and and Senate Republicans went on retreat to Philadelphia and this close retreat and they and I looked at the at the keynote speakers on this retreat and it was Donald Trump and and and and vice president pence and simon Sinek and me which was which was really really great but we got a little bit of time to hang out together and maybe cook up some things we want to talk about today and i here's my first question we have a crisis in leadership in this country and people in this audience who are really politically mixed and ideologically mixed have different ways of describing that crisis but there's nobody in here who thinks that leadership is the best it's been for our country politically or in business today describe the leadership crisis how we got here and then I'm going to ask you a little bit where we can go sure the leadership crisis has nothing to do with the presidency I think we've had a leadership crisis for for quite some time and we've been steadily getting it's been steadily getting worse over the past 20 or 30 years and it's primarily due to the fact that we we misunderstand what leadership is and the the strategies and the ways we're building our organizations are based on the false definition of leadership let me give you an example so in business for example too many of our standard business philosophies today the way we normally run businesses are leftovers from philosophies and ideas that were introduced in the 80s and 90s so for example the concept of shareholder supremacy was a theory proposed in late 1970s popularized in the 80s and 90s and is now the standard way of doing business remember the 80s and 90s were boom years relative peace in the world a kinder and gentler Cold War and so a lot of the ideas that we were generating on how to lead and and how to build our businesses were based on those conditions in other words when boom years are there we sort of become a little more selfish right so shareholder supremacy was a theory proposed back then popularized in 80s and 90s now standard way of doing business and arguably hasn't been a successful experiment every CEO of every public company it's a big open secret hates the analyst community hates Wall Street yet they play the game the concept of using mass layoffs to balance the books which is now standard practice and so many large businesses public and private that we don't even recognize how destructive it is to the human spirit and to the culture of an organization did not exist in the United States prior to the 1980s did not exist but it was popularized in the 80s and 90s and now has become normal and so you see a lot of those sort of me-first and putting the organization before the people or numbers before people really really in government policy and in business that are now standard today these are very very different times and I think that leadership hasn't hasn't kept up with the times the organizations that understand prioritizing human beings the life of the human being over the abstraction of a number are the ones that outperform out-innovate have by the way have no millennial problems then than the other companies give me a couple of examples of the more enlightened view that we actually see in business today yeah there's a few a smaller number in public in public companies but Bob Chapman who's sitting right here he's going to be talking tomorrow right tomorrow Bob Chapman runs a company called barry-wehmiller about a two or three billion dollar business about 8,000 employees good old-fashioned American manufacturing so when kimberly-clark need the machine to make toilet paper Valley barry-wehmiller makes that machine and if you ask Bob what does the company do he won't tell you we're in manufacturing he'll tell you that we're building extraordinary people to do extraordinary things and if you asked Bob how did he know he's successful he'll say we measure success by the way we touch the lives of people and he firmly believes these things and and and I've written about Bob in in leaders eat last it's how I come I came to know him about somebody who truly understands that business is a people thing and I'll give you one example of how he's different so in 2008 during the recession berry wavy Miller was hit very very hard by the recession of course in when in recessionary times large capital expenditures get cut first and so that affects buying new machinery and they lost 30% of their pipeline like that so like so many companies they couldn't afford their labor pool and like so many companies the board got together and said to Bob you need to have layoffs you need to save ten million dollars and Bob absolutely refused and instead what they did is they implemented a furlough program where every employee had to take four weeks of unpaid vacation they didn't have to take it consecutively he could take it whenever they wanted everybody from secretary to CEO and when bob announced the program to the company he said it's better we should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot and morale went up and what happens in well-led organizations is when leadership demonstrates a care for us as human beings the biological reaction to those conditions is we actually start caring for each other much more so in most organizations when leadership cares more about numbers than us and we'll sacrifice our lives to meet some arbitrary projection we hunker down and we become paranoid and self-interested and mistrustful right well something happened at Vario a miller that nobody expected and it wasn't part of the program which is people who could afford it more started trading with those who could afford it less so some would take five weeks so that others only had to take in other words the people started taking care of each other the recession they got out of the recessionary times the the furlough program was done away with they restored the 401k program they had frozen they actually back paid on 401 K from where they had frozen it and good luck hiring any of those employees even if you offered them more money they will not leave and the productivity innovation and intensity of this organization it's absolutely unbelievable and he completely went against what is considered standard and how we treat how we fix problems it's fantastic you know I have a strange case study that I found accidentally of that principal for those of you who don't know I'm the president of a think tank in Washington DC called the American Enterprise Institute and I took over on the January 1st 2009 and you know go back to January 1st 2009 we were we were worried that the ATM machines in this country we're going to stop working I mean we had no idea was going to happen to a financial system or an organization based 100% on voluntary philanthropy now that was a bad time to be volunteer of be relying on voluntary philanthropy and we were badly underwater my first day on the job and I didn't know what to do and I'd taught business and at the University for a long time and I'd learned I've thought about this principle that what do we do you cut everybody a hundred percent you cut everybody a little what do you do and so we took the shot and I didn't know if I was doing the right thing I'm not just such a you know wonderful humanitarian I thought well what will happen if we cut everybody a little and we cut the management team double as much okay and I went home on my first day on the job and I told my wife Esther honey I just cut my salary more than anybody else in the company and she said you know you're a great business man and and I mean that that and and I got to tell you it inflected the morale and our company it was accidental on my part it bears out Simon's principle we actually were able to improve our fundraising more than we ever had before and by October of 2009 we had restored everybody's pay and back paid everything we tipped out of their salaries in the very beginning of the year and in the following year we grew 26 percent I don't know if it was because of that but let me tell you the team didn't suffer and was no narrative a going around Washington DC that people were jumping the ship during this really really hard time so I'm here to tell ya I'm not such a great guy I just happened across this and this is very practical this actually works but it begs the question because the science is on our side I mean there's biology and on our side which is there's human beings of social animals and we respond to the environments we're in you take a good person you put them in a bad environment they do bad things you take somebody who maybe has perform bad acts maybe it's considered untrustworthy you put them in a good environment they'll turn their lives around and become remarkable trustworthy members of society we're social animals we respond to the environment srin leaders are supposed to produce the environments that produce you get the environment right you get trust and cooperation you get the environment wrong you get cynicism paranoia and mistrust and self-interest it's just a biological reaction so if we have the science on our side we have case studies on our side it begs the question why doesn't everybody do it and what I've come to learn is is because the these strategies that you guys employed it is hard to predict the time in which you will see the benefit from those decisions and companies don't like that companies like to know that on this day we can measure that the number will be what we want it to be right they prefer consistency over I mean they prefer intensity over consistency I mean if you consider you can't go to the gym for nine hours and get into shape but if you work out every single day for twenty minutes you absolutely will get into shape a hundred percent the problem is I don't know when I just know it will work right it's like brushing your teeth and businesses prefer intensity because they want to demonstrate X savings on X Day and and have that very easily measured the strategies that you guys employed we don't know when you'll see the fruit we just know it'll work and that's uncomfortable for a lot of organizations now on something it's not a lot of people's minds here is we started by talking about business leadership and a lot of people in here are business leaders to be sure highly practical suggestion that we have that's also consistent with the way that we want our hearts to work one of the principles that we have in my organization is that morals have to come before markets and I think that's manifestly true in any system in the world and the more you rely on markets by the way the more you have to think about your morals first I think that's an important thing to keep in mind but let's go to what is on a lot of people's mine's here as well which is to move from the business to the political apply some of these ideas to what we're actually seeing politically today not necessarily being really personal about what we're doing but but what's going wrong politically and how can we constructively change that on the basis of trust on the basis of leadership that's aspirational and that's uniting instead of dividing what we see in politics is a very it's a clear mirror of what's happening in business there they're one in the same we're short term has been prioritized over long term where what's in it for the organization has been prioritized over what's in it for the community and where is an organization in public companies for example meeting some arbitrary projection on some arbitrary date and meeting some analysts projection I'll tell you a quick funny story outside Gary Ridge he was the CEO of wd-40 great company his analysts called him on the analyst call chastise and said you missed you missed your numbers and Gary said no no I missed your numbers minor fine but what we see in politics is people prioritizing their re-election over doing doing something great I had a conversation with a member of Congress I will lead their name out of it and in a moment of I was a very uncomfortable conversation uncomfortable for them not for me where I made that we said I know human beings I know people in uniform who would risk their lives and have risked their lives to do the right thing I said you won't even sacrifice your job to do the right thing and I said here's the joke if you lost your election you'll get picked up by some by some lobbying group or some law firm anyway and you will make triple the money you're making now so what exactly are you losing like where is the sacrifice exactly and she and she actually agreed she as she said that we absolutely do prioritize getting our getting reelected over some of the decisions we have to make and then has this ridiculous rationalization that because if I don't win my re-election I can't I can't do good which is which is a backwards logic you do good and if you do good hopefully you'll win your reelection sometimes you can still do good even if you don't get reelected like they're not they're not mutually exclusive and and I think this started I think one of the problems is is that it's become a competitive environment politics and it's no longer cooperative environment and I think we can trace it back to Newt Gingrich's Contract with America where he was the first one to tell members because remember when you got elected to national office what you would do is you'd move your family to Washington and you would fight on that on the floor during the day but then you don't go to PTA meetings together at night and sit in the bleachers and what your kids play ball together and you knew each other as human beings and you saw each other as human beings now they come to Washington by themselves they work for two and a half days then they go back to their to their two home they don't move their families and they don't actually know each other they sometimes even within their own party they literally have no human and social interactions so they only see each other as competitors not as people and I think this is a very destructive way to run any organization we all know this that it's difficult to run to develop relationships at a distance we all know that it's much easier to resolve conflict when we're in a room together fighting with somebody as opposed to typing it we're sending mean emails to each other tweeting or tweeting at each other yeah not that that's salient no yeah culture today hypothetically speaking on and so I think I think federal I think national politicians should move their families to Washington again and try and get to know each other's humans again I think we've completely lost the humanity in politics I want to underline something assignments that just a minute ago because I think it's really important for us to understand that's central to the way that he thinks and it's hugely useful for all of us she does a lot of work with the military he does a lot of work with business he does a lot of work with politicians and what he has asked in a nutshell is this when he talks to people in the military he realizes that they have answered the question I know what I'm willing to die for we don't have to confront that in modern life very much yet we should be able to have the answer to that question and at very least have the answer the question is leaders what am I willing to fail for what am I willing to be fired for what am I willing to be humiliated for great leaders can answer that question and if the answer is nothing there's a problem that's what he's saying in a nutshell here and that's the big thing that each of us can take away what am I willing to be humiliated for where is it a good value to me where the benefits are higher than the costs and be able to sort that one else sort that one out on the way to aspirational leaders and I think you touching on what leadership is you know leadership has nothing to do with rank leadership is a responsibility it's not about being in charge it's about taking care of those in your charge and we you know I know many people who sit at the highest levels of organizations we all do who are not leaders they have authority and we do as they tell us because they have authority over us but we would not follow them and we all know people who are very junior in organizations who have no authority but they've made the choice to look after the person to the left of them and they've made the choice to look after the person to the right of them and that's why we call them leaders leaders are not necessarily the ones in charge they're the ones with the courage to go first first towards the unknown first towards the danger first to be humiliated because it's the right thing and the amazing thing is the reason we call them leaders is because when they do that others follow and and it really it really is a courage thing so then it begs the question where does courage come from spending time with folks in the military who what I've learned is courage is not some deep internal fortitude like you don't get down deep and find the courage it actually is an external thing that so when I got to meet people who'd risk their lives I asked them why did you do it you have a family you have kids no one would have faulted you if you didn't do it no one would have ordered you to do what you did why did you do it they all give the same answer because they would have done it for me in other words when we have the belief that someone has our backs when we have the absolute certainty that someone cares about us and is there by our side and believed in us we we actually are able to do extraordinary things but without those relationships it's very hard to muster courage it's some some world famous trapeze artist is not going to try a brand new death-defying act for the first time without a net it's the net it's that external thing that gives us the courage to do difficult things in other words it goes back to human relationships again and so when we foster those relationships when we foster the the the love and the community we actually have the courage to do what you're saying we need to do but when we don't when we when politicians and businessman when we all feel lonely in our in positions of rank I think that that actually hurts the ability to leave yeah I saw a very interesting I've been doing research on the subject of courage why because I'm very interested in the subject of fear when we talk about not knowing what you're willing to be accumulated and fail over it means that you have a fear-based model and fear is directly related to pride and it's bound up and courage and trying to net us out a ton of very interesting body of work by a psychologist the University of British Columbia who's done work on on fear you know this work where what his talk to bomb squad members of the British police force in Northern Ireland those who did a lot of work in the 70s and early 80s and then fighter pilots who had been in combat and here's the very interesting thing that he found courage is not the absence of fear he found that about 26% of people in really dangerous jobs don't feel fear they're fearless they're the worst leaders the ones who really are great leaders feel the fear and act anyway courage is a response to fear and you can't expect you literally you can't actually just exhibit courage unless you feel fear fear is incredibly important for your virtue is the way that this turns out so fear is not the enemy the idea the the title of fearless leaders and insult courageous leader that's actually something that we should all be aspiring to and I found from that literature and it reminds me of the stuff that you've talked about in Rich's our understanding of how fear works in the first place and it goes back to your work and what I love about your work when you talk about morals and morality in leadership and I think and it goes back to Milton Friedman you know we have a standard definition that we sort of embraces the definition of business and the responsibility of companies as a Milton Friedman definition and you said where's the effect of you know the purpose of business is to to maximize profits within the bounds of the law which i think is a completely wrong definition it's a very you know morality and ethics are a higher standard than the law and we hear it all the time when organizations do things that we we no we're wrong they make us uncomfortable and we question them they all say the same thing we broke no laws I mean here's the analogy right which is so the Titanic the builders of the Titanic when they built that organ at ship the the laws and regulations that govern lifeboats back then were built for the biggest ships that existed in the time which were ferries and Titanic was four times bigger than the biggest ferry so there was no lifeboats for all regulation it didn't exist it was based on numbers so the the makers of the Titanic because it's too expensive to put all lifeboats for all actually put the maximum number of lifeboats as required by regulation on the Titanic which was a quarter of what the size of the boat actually was right but they actually left berths for future lifeboats knowing that eventually the regulations would catch up right so the Titanic gets a like an iceberg we all know the story do you know how many people died on the Titanic versus how many were saved 25% of the people who were on the aboard the Titanic were saved 25% three-quarters died in other words about the number of lifeboats they didn't have they broke no laws but clearly morality says shouldn't you have a lifeboat for everyone even though they broke no laws now that's the analogy for the way I think too much of business is conducted which is conducted with the bounds of the law where everybody knows that there's a morality that they're missing and they know that eventually the regulations will catch up but I don't understand why people don't act morally we despite the law this is this is this is this is your this is your frame this is yours this year you know I want to I want to speaking of this I actually do want to pivot a little bit to a slightly different area that you've written about that we both thought about and what I want to do is I want to tell you a study that I just read that blew my mind and I want you to react to it okay I read a study I read about 15 social psych and behavioral science studies every morning which is not normal and and but I read business as a study about empathy about empathy and leadership and empathy and it was looking at the most effective leaders with respect to to how they manage their workforces and the bottom line of their companies but but but not just the public valuation these companies really a robust understanding of effective leaders and what I found was the most effective leaders over the course of their leadership career the cadence of the leadership career there's some really interesting stuff for example they tend to be the most effective between the ages of 55 and 70 that's the zone of effective leadership for particularly for business leaders because high energy high wisdom haven't said screw it yet okay that's and so that's one of the interesting findings from this but here's what I'm getting at the study also found that as they went through the cadence of their careers and got more and more and more effective their empathy went down they had lower empathy at the end of their careers than at the beginning and it was monotonically decreasing over the course of their careers what a simon Sinek say what's monotonically mean that means continuously okay okay I got that from Shakespeare I'm surprised by that to be honest the the the whole idea that they're that they're better at the end makes more sense because you know if you want candid advice you ask an old person because they don't care what you have what you think about them and happiness studies show that as well people are at their happiest when they're young because they're oblivious and they're and they're happiest when they're old he didn't say clueless if I don't go to her and they're happiest when they're old because they've faced their own mortality and their and their peace and like they don't care what you think about them anymore and people actually at their least happiest in middle age where you're most concerned what everybody thinks about you and if you're successful if you're good-looking if you you know if you're doing well and all of that stuff and so the idea that empathy would actually go down later the only thing that I could react to that is they just become jaded I'm surprised by it to be honest and maybe it goes to that thing that they don't they don't care what you think about them anymore I don't let me give you a second piece of the puzzle now now I think that we're that and this is what opened my eyes to it and also more details about who they were right I mean that's a force there's a missing detail that for sure among others they they got less empathetic but they got more compassionate that's the interesting part empathy and compassion are not the same thing linking to somebody emotionally is not the same thing as being dedicated to doing the right thing for people even when it's hard I think that I agree with because because they don't have to be all wrapped up in the emotion of the people that they're serving but they have a deep-seated belief that the right thing to do is to take care of the people because it's the right thing to do so perhaps being perhaps being empathetically disconnected actually makes it easier to be compassionate because it becomes intellectualized as opposed to because you can make stupid decisions based on empathy because there's too much feeling where you can actually say the right thing I think it I think it's the moral compass I think it sounds like the moral compass grows even though I'm not personally invested emotionally in the decisions of what's happening I just know it's the right thing to do I mean this is a me point that you you make it leaders at last isn't it it's like leaders particularly military leaders that you talk about are not empathetic with their charges but they're highly compassionate whether charges in the robust sense of this right I think that's very interesting I think that's very interesting so I asked I was thinking about an example of this principle that I could really really use and I have this strange friendship and an ongoing working relationship with His Holiness the Dalai Lama which is the most unexpected thing because he hangs out at the think tank in America everybody knows what you work right he knows where I work you know he doesn't worry work was the weirdest thing of all right I mean you'd think that and and what you notice when you're dealing a lot closely with the Dalai Lama that there's not a strong sense of him linking to you with your personal experiences on the contrary you say goodbye and it's remorseless and you say hello and it's like he just saw you remember maybe never saw you before but he's highly compassionate really really compassionate person and it seemed to me and one time when I was leaving him after I'd been with him for several days and he said to me he said I see you and and I always want to give you something but I don't own anything and he said but I want to find something so we looked into his little purple or his little maroon and orange purse and he pulled out a pen he had a pen he said I've had this ballpoint pen somebody gave it to me 15 years ago it was kind of a nice pen like one of those $15 pen and uh and he said I want you to I want you to have this I want you to have this and it was like he was giving me the Holy Grail or something for Dalai Lama giving the penalty Wow and and I put it like and I put it in my briefcase and I carried it around for a year and and I looked at it and I gave me a warm feeling and then I was having lunch with a friend of mine who's the auxilary Roman Catholic bishop for Los Angeles and then Bishop Robert Barron get really good friend of mine and we were talking and we were eating in a sandwich place and he was writing on a napkin or he was he gave pulling a napkin and I said something you want to write it down he said do you have a pen and I said I ha ha ha I know I do and then I said to him and this was I'm not embarrassed about this because this was prideful and it was sort of self-centered and I said the Dali Lama gave me that ha ha and he said oh I've always loved the Dali Lama I admired him so much I've always wanted to meet him and he talked about how his work and affected him so very very much and at that moment the Dali Lama and his compassion came to me and he already said to me look there and I'm not insane but you know what he's something you already said to me he said you know what you need to do and I gave Bishop Baron that pen because the gift of that pen was in the giving of that pen and I had no idea I had that had never occurred to me in the in the past I mean I certainly I've learned that I learned that in Sunday school or something one of the kid but but but the Dalai Lama taught me that not with empathy he taught me that with a deep act of compassion and it changed my life a tiny little bit you know now we're talking about it I wonder if you need to have empathy and middle-management I wonder if you need to have empathy when you're actually physically not more connected with your team and then later as you gain seniority that's where compassion is because the people you're physically connected with is going to be a senior group of people you're not going to be connected with you know the rank-and-file so you can't actually have empathy with people that you have no relationship with so you you actually need compassion I wonder if that's the thing because you know in a in a company size group of soldiers Marines whatever it's about 200 people and even if you get smaller than that you talk to folks in the military and they'll talk they'll say that they can judge when a young lieutenant is a good lieutenant because of the way that the troops refer to him or her they'll say that's our lieutenant as opposed to volute it's always of the colonel because it's too far it's too it's always the colonel but that's our lieutenant when that when the when the troops make the transition from the lieutenant to our lieutenant that means there's a relationship and I think at that level you need to have empathy you need to know your troops you need to know their names you need to know their faces you need to know their families I think in business you need to know your people you need to know the names of their kids you need to know what where they live what that goes on in their lives but as you become disconnected physically I think that's where compassion that makes perfect sense can we write about this yeah we very much by the way is unrehearsed yeah I've got two quick questions Larry and then I want to go to you good so we've got Dudley 20 minutes for so start getting your thoughts and we'll talk about the ground rules on all the how that stuff works just here in a second but first I want to ask a question before before I get to your new creative product which I'm really fascinated with but for I have one more question and it's about happiness I've written about happiness you've written about happiness tell me how important it is for you and me and everybody in this audience to be happy leaders I don't like the term happiness I like the term fulfillment I like that I like the term joy you know happiness to me is something that is fleeting and you can have happiness because you win the piece of business or you hit your numbers or you go see a movie or and happiness is wonderful and it's great and then it goes away you know it doesn't last we're deep fulfillment like love meaning me nervous purpose all of that can or you could say the why the why yeah as it were but but deep deep fulfillment I think is a much higher standard it let me equate it to like you don't like your kids every day but you love your kids every day you know it's that case is true yeah Andrew and so deep truth friend you don't have to be happy every day but you can be fulfilled every day you don't have to be you don't have to like your job every day but you can love your job every day and and I think that people confuse the two and people are seeking happiness in their work and they're doing it through all the ways you would think they would do it in in short term things or like you know you and you think the way we we lead young people to which is we put in free food and bean bags and all these fun things at the office because when my current employees happy and it absolutely works it just doesn't make them fulfilled and they still are unhappy they still quit or they still unfulfilled may still quit and I think this is the problem I think we've confused the terms because they're not they're not the same so I'm more interested in people finding deep fulfillment in their work and and I'm sure they will find happiness throughout that also this is interesting because of course you're defining the Aristotelian understanding of deep happiness which is a good life well-lived based on a sense of meaning and purpose and yet we've we've fallen into a definition of psychological happiness in society where we're searching for something that that is inherently ephemeral and what we want to find is something consistent with our deepest views and now you'll is that there's an irony in that too which is the idea of searching for happiness right right it's not it's not a scavenger hunt you don't be like look under a rock like I found happiness I found the job I love you know it's like you don't even get you know find love either like you find somebody who who cares about you that you care about you fall in love I'm not sure exactly what day it happened and then you work tirelessly every day to stay in love because if you stop working the love goes away and it's the same at work you don't find a job you love you find a place where you share the values you fit they care about you as a human being you fall in love with your job and you work tirelessly tirelessly every day to take care of the people around you you remain fulfilled so I think the whole concept of searching for happiness or searching for the job that you love are searching for love is completely misguided it's finding an area where you could work hard at it and then you have to work hard to keep it and the worst part is so today and if one of you quit then the thing goes goes haywire and that goes for for employees and for for management which is they have to work hard but at this and so do we so I think our language is is not helping us before we deal you're going to tell me you I was gonna talk about Yong Yong talked about the important that that somebody can't be truly happy and fulfilled in their life until their day-to-day existence and work is consistent with their own deepest values the hardest thing to do is not to find the right job the hardest thing to do is to figure out what you believe the weirdest thing is that most people actually don't know what they think most people don't know what they want most people don't know what their deepest values are and this gets back to your point a little bit earlier what are you willing to fail for if you want to figure out what you believe figure out what you'd be willing to be completely humiliated and fired over and if you notice answer to that then you're on track to find Simon's understanding of deep fulfillment as the superior substitute for psychological happiness as long as there's a group of people around you who care about you and have your back you you can find the courage to fail or be humiliated I think I don't think we can do by ourselves or fewer the people who can do it and I wouldn't trust them yeah before we turn to our friends too to grill you a little bit more tell me about your new book what's on your mind what's going up at night oh yeah no it's wonderful I've become obsessed with game theory it's fascinating stuff so whenever there is at least two competitors in the system you have a game and the rules of game theory apply and if you know the dick games with the rules of the game you can you can do well if you don't know the rules of game you're not going to do well the vast majority of organizations who are in a contest actually do not understand the rules of their game which means they're most organizations are heading toward zero which is fascinating play so here's the quick of it there are two types of games there are finite games and they're infinite a finite game is defined as known players fixed rules and add agreed upon objective baseball we know the rules we all agree whoever has more runs at the end of nine innings of the winner and we all go home when you have an infinite game infinite games are defined as known and unknown players the rules are changeable and the objective is to perpetuate the game to keep the game and play when you put a finite player versus a finite player the system is stable baseball is stable when you put an infinite player versus an image net player the system is also stable like the Cold War because you cannot have a winner or a loser in the Cold War right so you keep the game and play and what happens in infinite contest its players drop out of the game when they run out of the will or the resources to play but the game perpetuates with or without them right so the game of business is an infinite game the game of business has pre-existed every single company on the planet it will outlast every single company on the planet there's no such thing as winning the game of business it doesn't exist and when one player goes bankrupt or his merger acquired they drop out of the game and another competitor will replace them a new company will emerge a new technology will emerge but if you listen to the language of business you are very quickly see that most businesses actually don't know the game they're in they talk about being number one beating their competition being the best based on what accreta agreed-upon objectives based on what agreed-upon timeframe so that means when you're playing by finite rules and infinite contest you will quickly go to zero so here's a real-life example I spoke at an education summit from Microsoft I also spoke at an education summit for Apple at the Microsoft summit the vast majority of the executives spent most of their PowerPoint presentations talking about how to beat Apple at the Apple summit the a hundred percent of the executives spend a hundred percent of their presentations talking about how to help teachers teach and how to help students learn one was obsessed with where they were going the other one was obsessed with beating their competition guess which one is in quagmire right so at the end of my talk at Microsoft they gave me a new Zune when it was a thing that was their competitor to the iPod and this thing was spectacular it was the most gorgeous piece of technology I've ever used the user interface was beautiful it was simple it was user friend it was really fantastic but of course nobody ever bought one because it's a different story so I when I was done working at Apple I was sharing a taxi with a senior Apple executive did ever tell you this was sharing attacked with a senior Apple executive sort of employing up a twelve kind of guy so I decided to stir the pot to bad habit and I turned him and I say you know I was at Microsoft and they gave me the new Zune and it is so much better than your iPod touch and he turned to me and he said I have no doubt conversation over because an infinite player understands sometimes your head and sometimes your behinds sometimes they have a better product sometimes you have a better product the objective is not to win every battle the objective is to outlast them and so one organization is making strategic decisions for a short-term gain of beating their competition based on some arbitrary number and arbitrary time frame that they picked whereas the other organization is being built for resilience and I love that there's over 80% of the Dow index of companies 35 years a younger where all the old companies gone where they and even some of the old ones aren't really old they've been merged and acquired so many times they're not really the companies that work well one one thing I want to point out based on that time is the work that relates to the earlier comments that he was making the original comments that we made about the leadership crisis in the United States is that the competition and cooperation are typically thought of as antagonistic to each other the biggest mistake that we make when we talk about business where we talk about politics when we talk about family life or community life is to say that you either have to be all about competition or all about cooperation if you're all about one and you don't have a balance with the other you will lose you will lose and you will be ineffective the truth of the matter is that the New York Yankees are both competitive and cooperative with the Boston Red Sox nobody in the Yankees organization except for the most rabid fans thinks you should be blowing up the Red Sox bus on the way to the game the best the best the best infinite players this is right your point the best internet players they they they love having a worthy adversary so Montgomery kept a portrait of Bramall in his quarters they had deep respect for each other and they love the idea of competing against each other intellectually and besting each other but they considered each other worthy adversaries and so I think it's very important for teams or companies to view their competition is worthy adversaries rather than someone to beat and remember that there are rules and their compact competi that there are rules of cooperation that actually make business work better and should be respectful of them on the content we should actually celebrate when Apple was going bankrupt it was Microsoft bailed them out we have 15 minutes and one second left for you and here here's kind of how it works we have we have our friends who have microphones and you put your hand up and I'm going to call on you and the mics going to come to you if you would stand up and tell me you're going to be first because I saw your hands first and you're going to tell us your name and and where you're from and what's on your mind Mike's coming to you right now am I doing this right yes ma'am my name is Giselle from North Carolina and I thank first of all for an amazing conversation about leadership and inspiration my question is or what I've asked you to try to close the loop on it's fascinating the concept of game theory and I wondered if you could tie that back to the very first set of comments around people versus you know focus on people within business etc and if it's relevant if you pincer to talk about social innovation and the opportunities there because you've mostly fought you know sort of focused on corporate enterprise versus social enterprise yeah so in order to play the infinite game you have to have teamwork and you have to take care of your people because if you only if if the entire organization is built is built on a sort of hit the goal get the bonus of the goal get the bonus of the goal cut the bonus you can actually create an organization where people be competitive against each other not with each other and it'll in time it'll destroy the internal culture so building strong teams and prioritizing people is the only way to play the infinite game because it also builds into it resilience beyond the personality of the person at the top because very often you'll see some wonderful wonderful organizations with this wonderful inspired leader but they cannot survive the loss of their inspired we saw it happened at Walmart time wasn't was great and then he left and then Mike Duke eventually came in you're like you have to be kidding me you know total opposite kind of leader and we see that all too often and so I tend you can only play the end of the game if if people see that the Deo responsibilities to take the torch and carry it forward not to sort of be in the best job you know nobody nobody's vying politically for the number one job kind of thing so it's essential for the infinite game and in terms of the social world I rail the fact that we distinguish the two as separate it drives me nuts I hate the fact that we call not profits nonprofits that's a tax delineation no one wants to be defined by what they aren't it also makes money a dirty thing not profit you need money to sustain money is fuel you can have a beautiful car no fuel don't go and then we call or and charity is a terrible word as well as if we doing something for free right why don't I think they should call themselves for impact organizations right I work for a for impact organization and here's and by the way you better be profitable but you define profit differently if your objective is to rescue kittens from trees then you better be rescuing more kittens from trees this month than you were last month that is profit so the money is the fuel and and the profit is defined by whatever your cause is and and your in the for impact space but the rules are all the same for both organizations mmm right here in the back and then we're going to come over to right in the middle right here a good morning great talk my name is Alex Rosenfeld from climate impact Capital based in Houston I'd love to get your thoughts as an optimist as how you could apply or how we could all apply game theory to the issues of climate change certainly it's a very interesting game where people can opt out and be free riders on others but we all need to work together to make an impact so I love to hear your thoughts on how we can game the game the game to make it work for all of us yeah so I was that the Southern Company thing this morning we were talking about just just that and there was some language that was that I realized we again would Arthur and I've been saying that some of the language sort of hijacks us unfortunately and I think the language of sustainability is the wrong language because sustainability is it's a it sounds like a liberal philosophy and I think the word that we should be using is resilience I think is our planet resilient are we helping the planet be resilient are our organization's resilient because we're relying on limited fossil fuels that's not resilient and and so I think we've done it I think the I think the climate scientists have done a bad job marketing I think is just I think the problem in marketing because it was very rational and it was very paternalistic and it was never really stated as a cause that we could all join in on it was sort of a political philosophy so I think language is one of the big challenges there and one of the things I'm learning is I think resilience are we building a resilient planet our friend from Houston made one assertion that that that I think is important just come on dry out on one quick point are you an optimist yeah because it occurs to me when I'm listening to you I mean optimism suggests that there is a set path that the future is kind of out there already and and we believe that the future will be better than the president I think he was more of a hopeful person as somebody who believes that the future can be in our hands if we do the right thing I don't know the outcome Simon doesn't know the outcome of Simon believes that each of us can be the agent of positive change and as such I mean that hope is a great theological virtue not optimism I take you as a it's kind of a prophet of hope more than a prophet of optimism okay [Applause] [Laughter] so I thought I thought that was beautiful and he just liked everything I mean it's like all right next question fine it's like we're right here we got the mic coming to you ma'am what we got it might come to you ma'am outside nine of Mike Lemoine I'm in the apparel business the questions that how do you build the team and what do you do when you have team players who are either not competent or not passionate about the game or defensive okay sure so competence absolutely matters of course you know you hired them so what did you see in them that you hire did they lie to you and the question is is it that they're incompetent or is that that they're in the wrong place inside the organization if there are they in competent do they have a lack of training so is there a mechanism for somebody to say to you so an organization that is well lead has you can have vulnerability there's a circle of save this vulnerability in that organization vulnerability doesn't mean we will walk around crying vulnerability means someone could walk into your office and say I don't think I'm I'm prepared to do this job that you've asked me to do I don't feel qualified to do it or they can come to you and say I made a mistake or they come to you and say I'm scared or I'm having trouble at home those we don't know what's producing the failure in the or the struggle in the performance it could be any host of things that may or may not be their competence so the question is do you have a mechanism for to have that conversation you talked about people who aren't passionate passionate is everyone's passionate we're just not all passionate for the same thing passion is a result it's like it's like profit which is if I'm engaged in something that feeds my soul and I feel safe in the environment I'm in and I feel like I'm growing I will be passionate and so if you if you say that people are unpatented inside the organization I wouldn't blame the people I'd say either they're in the wrong job or you shouldn't have hired them because they don't actually fit your value set or there's something going on in their life that maybe we should be concerned about them like are you okay your passion is down I expect this is not like you and what was the third point and defensive so so if people are defensive again is there a culture of feedback do you have a culture where honest feedback is is expected and required which doesn't happen overnight are they put in environments where they can feel safe being criticized as opposed to feeling that they need to be defensive again I don't blame the people are they - have they ever taken do you have a communications training course do you teach effective confrontation because maybe the person being defensive it's the person who's confronting them who doesn't know how to have a confrontation and if you attack me that way I'd be defensive too so it's not always the people we were so quick to say they're incompetent they're not passionate and they're defensive and yet we don't look at ourselves and say maybe I don't know how to have a confrontation maybe I'm not being empathetic enough and maybe we shouldn't have hired them or we put them the wrong position and then if we made a bad hire we can't blame them for that so how do we help because if we're not happy with them they're not happy working how do we help them find a new job with dignity fantastic we're going to go to the back of the right and we'll come up right here okay right here in the back hello my name is forum emblem I have a startup based on Mexico City I give you this and I wanted to ask what you supply your thoughts were regarding that more often than not we found ourselves surrounded by negative environments and you spoke about this analogy of the Acrobat not doing stunts without a safety net which would be people caring for you what about if that doesn't happen I think that the really the point is trying to make negative ecosystem environments into good environment yes and maybe trying to go further than that step of empathy and compassion towards doing something that you know that other people will not do for you yeah you do it for them instead of waiting for them to do it for you yeah if you're truly in a toxic environment one option is always to look to leave that environment right if it's a job right but that's not necessarily the only option I would I and and this is sort of based similar question that I get often which is what happens if you're in middle management and senior management doesn't get any of this stuff and they only care about numbers before people met people before numbers the the answer is you ignore you ignore them because you can't influence or control that which you cannot control and you take responsibility for the things you can control in other words yourself and you become the leader you wish you had you become a student of leadership and you you you obsess about making sure that the people with whom you work the people whose names you know and faces you recognize that they are able to go home every day and say to their loved ones I love my job because of what you're doing for them in other words you you commit yourself to the life of service you commit yourselves to to the practice of leadership and taking care of the people over whom you can influence they could be above you below you to the left or the right of you but this very small Enclave and what starts to happen is these little subcultures start to emerge of incredible joy and happiness within more toxic environments because they're all taking care of each other and what happens is one of those people gets moved to go somewhere else they take those lessons they start to do the same thing it starts to grow the performance of those groups tends to be better than others and if you get a critical mass the tail wags the dog the internal can actually change the direction of the entire organization it takes time though I think the short version of that is model the behavior that you want to see and that is so true for each one of us all over in our lives how many people are complaining about about the the bitterness and the anger and the hostility in politics today to what extent are we modeling the behavior that we want to see if you wish people treated each other with greater warm-heartedness in the face of overwhelming political contempt how have you treated somebody with whom you disagree with warm-heartedness instead of with contempt and and each one of us can actually change the world a tiny little bit in the next 24 hours by doing exactly that we're going to have an opportunity to do that this is how we do it at work but each one of us can model the behavior that we want to see in our ordinary lives that's that's that's moral agency that my friends that that's power amen all right we're going to come right we were going to come right up to the right yes ma'am I can't remember I had promised we'd come up to this region here so thank you oh hi my name is Komal I'm from San Francisco California and thank you for this great talk and for I've made every employee of mine watch both of your TED Talks several times so thank you so my question is can a company's - if a company has to wise so for instance mine does we recover high-quality surplus food from businesses and events that would otherwise throw it away and then redistribute that food to nonprofits that are in need so essentially technology to solve both hunger and food ways so my why is much more fueled through you know Radek ating a world hunger which we believe we can do whereas other people on my team are much more field about reducing food waste can those two y's be equally weighed in a company and can that why if one of the Y's is more of the profit-making engine of the company be more visible in some avenues and less than others yeah so the I would you don't have more than one why why is the purpose cause of relief upon which the organization exists that exists on a level higher than the thing that you do so what you explained to me was what the company does or you explain a strategic road to get to something else right so there is a purpose or cause that drives you are you the founder so there's a purpose of course that drives you that you saw this as an effective means to advance whatever cause or belief that you leave them and you saw that feeding people or is a good strategy is a good means to advise advance something that's even bigger than that and if you didn't do this you do something else so you only have one why and I would argue that you haven't yet articulated yet and the reason that all of your so you're having issues inside the organization where some people believe in this one but some people believe in that one that means you're not at the Y the Y level says we all believe in this we all work different ways to it so our organization are wise to inspire people to do the things that inspire them I haven't told you a single thing about what we do yet and we have a vision that if everything we do comes to life we can imagine a world in which the vast majority of people will wake up every single morning inspired to go to work feel safe when they're there and return home fulfilled at the end of the day now what do we do well inside the organization there's all kinds of stuff and we all are passionate about different ways to advance that so I'm the dancing monkey who speaks in writes about it right and then there are folks inside our organization who want nothing to do with what I do they hate they would never want to do this but they found ways to do it through taking care of the customer like literally having the face-to-face they love that and they see that that is the best means to events are our cause which is to have that face to face advice right and so but we all believe in the same cause and so I would argue that you haven't actually articulated your why yet because there's only one my friends we are coming to the end of our session and I want to take simply the last 20 seconds to sum up the four big things that we've learned and heard from simon Sinek today principle number one leaders who know their own why understand shared sacrifice which is a privilege not a negative principle number two ask yourself what am i willing to fail for if you can answer that you're on track to understanding your why principle number three is the courage is the ability to act in the face of fear but to do that we need people we trust find those people you trust and be those people that other people can trust and principle number four is that purpose matters more than happiness so set upon your own purpose and help other people find theirs good words good thoughts words for a better world from simon Sinek thank you [Applause]

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 379,901

Rating: 4.7777777 out of 5

Keywords: Simon Sinek, Arthur Brooks, leadership, Aspen Ideas Festival

Id: VUPTh7izX8k

Length: 58min 40sec (3520 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2017