Simon Sinek Explains What Almost Every Leader Gets Wrong | Inc.

[Music] tell me about the infinite game and what are the issues that you had that led to the wisdom in the infinite game so I'm an idealist I'm an optimist and and the problem is I live in a world we all live in a world in which the overwhelming pressures are on us to make the numbers hit the target you know whatever it whatever it is it's all very very finite and and I it feels wrong to me but I can't tell you why you know I just doesn't like why can i how can I tell that person that that's wrong that there's another way of seeing the world when that's the way the world works you know almost all business is based on quarterly annual results you know we have targets Mitch we we most people are incentivized based on if you hit your numbers by a certain date you know neglecting the fact that both those targets and those dates are arbitrary you know somebody picked a number and usually it's one year because that's when we pay taxes like that's pretty much it and it was this I tripped over this idea like a trip over all my ideas there's a James Carr see who's an NYU theologian retired now he wrote a little book in 1986 called finite and infinite games and it proposed that there are these two types of games finite games and infinite games a finite game is defined as known players fixed rules and agreed-upon objectives baseball and the the the purpose is to win right then you have infinite games which are defined as known and unknown players the rules are changeable and the objective is to perpetuate the game and to stay in it as long as possible and so we are all unwitting players in infinite games so for example is there's there's no such thing as being number one in marriage there's no such thing as being the winner in friendship you know there's no such thing as winning national politics there's no such thing as winning education or winning your career and there's definitely no such thing as winning business right I'm the winner of business like it doesn't exist because there's there's no end right there is no finish line but if we listen to the language of most leaders they talk about being the best being number one and beating their competition there's no agreed-upon metrics and there's no degree to have fun timeframes so it's not true and so what this so I realized that if infinite games exist and we're unwitting players and infinite games but we're leading as if we're finite players as if we're in final games then then we needed a new a new set of directions to guide us on how to lead in the infinite game how to lead in the infinite game of business and the book that I'm the book infinite game really challenges many of the accepted notions of how business works today you know it really is an indictment of American and Western business America in particular of Western business philosophies which were pretty much honed in the 80s and 90s so if you consider that the concept of shareholder supremacy was a theory proposed in late 1970s popularized in the 80s and 90s now it's standard fair yes when you hear CEOs talk about prioritizing the shareholder that was just a theory in the late 1970s and it was popularized during the boom years of the 80s and 90s of a time of reggae relative peace you know and now it's no longer boom years and these are no longer relative peace these are different times and yet the theories haven't adapted the concept of using mass layoffs to balance the books think about that for a second it we are going to use the livelihoods of our people in order to meet arbitrary projections for an arbitrary date as opposed to test we're still profitable which will be more profitable and and and in so doing destroy our culture destroy trust and destroy cooperation and then companies are flabbergasted why they can't hold on to employees why discretionary effort is declining why you know they and they blame Millennials Millennials you know aren't loyal no that's not true at all Millennials are growing up in a world in which companies offer no loyalty that is not a meritocracy it doesn't matter how hard you work it doesn't matter how good you are it does matter how good a teammate you are that if the company misses it's arbitrary projections on the arbitrary date you're at I look back and I realize oh my god we got so much wrong in the 80s and 90s Milton Friedman Milt Friedman was a Nobel prize-winning economist who offered us what is considered the definition of the responsibility of business today which is he proposed that the responsibilities of business is to maximize profit within the bounds of law what about ethics right that's the equivalent of me being in a long term relationship right and I cheat on my girlfriend and when she finds out and confronts me with it I say to her you can't be upset with me because I broke no laws uh-huh which would be true by the way yeah it's not like marriage where there's a contract like there's actually no law governing this relationship right so when companies do very unethical things that make us uncomfortable we all know it's gross and then we put them in front of Congress and they testify all the CEOs say the same thing we were we acted within the bounds of the law that is a very low standard right but these are the standards and shareholder supremacy and the the the the shorter and shorter term goals we set and mass layoffs and rank and yank and all these stupid ideas that came from the 80s and 90s which were fine for the 80s and 90s are really doing more damage to American businesses than in the past and so this book really attempts to challenge the finite thinking that governs most businesses and offer a new a new new perspective what does working at a company where a leader has an understanding that there are in an infinite game the whole organization understands that this is an infinite game what does that look like if a company leads based on the infinite game what you will find is that there's a sense of cause at the heart of the company it's it's it's not about being the biggest or being the best because we accept there's there's no such thing right there's the sense of winning like there's a sense of progress and moving forwards advance might call it I would call it adherence to the cause and advancement of the cause there's a sense of advancing but there's no sense like we're gonna be the best or we are the best because everything's temporary right you're the best for now based on the metrics you chose based on the time frames you chose you know you could you know you can you can write it any way you want and so in an infinitely led company you'll send you'll find that as a sense of cause so just that Pillet people are willing to sacrifice for it meaning they would turn down for example a better paying job because they'd rather be here and be a part of this it feeds my soul it makes me feel like my life has value my work has meaning right so you'll find just causes at the center of it you'll find a vastly greater concentration of trust that there are trusting teams that people are willing to say I made a mistake or I need help and expect that people will rush to them to help them solve the problem or give them the support they need as opposed to finding of being afraid yes that if they say anything that they'll find themselves in a shortlist you know at the end of the financial year and without trusting teams you know too many people are coming to work lying hiding and faking we hide our mistakes we never admit that we don't know what we're doing we get promoted to a job where we feel a lot of control but we're not gonna ask for help or say I need more training and so when you lie hide and fake every day when we lie I didn't fake every day eventually things break so infinitely led companies have much much higher proportions of trust that just you know inside the company and wouldn't we want to work there they also made the very clever shift away from seeing those in their industry as competitors and rather see them as rivals because a competitor is someone you want to beat right and the obsession is too much again on the finite right what are the metrics how we gonna get ahead of them a rival is someone whose strengths reveals to you your own weaknesses so to see those in your industry and admire where they are better that you instead of trying to beat them you look at where your weaknesses are in improve its constant improvement right and that's a very sophisticated idea too to not see those in your industry as competitors to be beaten but rather as rivals that were reveal to us our weaknesses so that we can improve that's a tough mindset it's a tough mindset to all of this stuff is tough everything everything about everything about running an infinite organization and being an infinite leader is difficult because the finite is just so much easier it's laid out it's easily measurable you can count it you it's you know it's where the infinite is sometimes more ethereal now there were always finite within the infinite you know there were there were winds within but each wind has context like it goes back to the story of me turning down a client which is you know I could win this piece of business and make the money but the context of what I'm trying to achieve this is the wrong client to help me do that and so now I only want to win the business within the context of the just cause of the infinite game and so everything takes on new meaning and it is all unbelievably difficult and it is much easier to focus on the finite even though will do damage as we go and it is much more fulfilling to be on the infinite yeah it's much more stressful to be in the finite game there's much more fear in the finite game the infinite game is inspiring but yeah if it were easy everyone would do it it's an our economy and most of our incentive programs and rewards packages and companies are not geared around the infinite game at all and so there's there's no pressure to play the infinite game quite the opposite all the pressure is to play the finite game so it's incredibly difficult but my god when you get it right the innovation skyrockets Trust skyrockets cooperation skyrockets the ability to adapt to change in in in technology skyrockets I mean here's some examples of finite industries that are that are embarrassing right so the publishing industry didn't invent Amazon the movie industry didn't invent Netflix right it's it's the car the car the car companies didn't come up with Tesla like an upstart is taken on the auto manufacturers like they're so preoccupied with the existing business models and protecting what they have you know like when blockbuster was a thing they they saw Netflix coming they saw the subscription model that Netflix was offering which was different to their model even though streaming wasn't it that wasn't quality there yet they knew it was coming in the CEO then then CEO of Blockbuster recommended to the board that we really need to change our business model and the board would not allow him to do so because the company made 12% of its revenues from late fees and if you go to subscription you'll lose all that revenue and now they're bankrupt that's called finite thinking where they're so obsessed with protecting the status quo because they they have benefited from the status quo that they that they literally will not undergo the existential flex they need to take to stay in business and so now you have publishing that has their lunch being eaten by a company that they should have invented you have the movie industry that's struggling to figure out how to keep keep up with you know why isn't it that the the the the the architecture firms and property companies didn't come up with we work they were so busy making their own offices that they thought it was you know they and so all of these companies all these industries are being disrupted by people outside their industry that's an indictment on the way in which they view their businesses infinite businesses are much more adaptable infinite companies can bend and weave much more easily with changes in technology and see the writing on the wall and the ones that have done it in the past we think that they can tell the future you know people Steve Jobs could tell the future no he couldn't of course he couldn't tell the future he had an it he had a just cause he was leading an infinite organization he was an infinite leader and he was able to see that investing in the graphic user interface was the right way to go even though that's not the direction they were going in at the time and that idea that big flex became the Macintosh the entire platform of Windows is designed to act like a Macintosh so that was a huge idea Kodak couldn't make the existential flex Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 but couldn't bear the thought of changing their company away from film and chemicals and machines to embrace this digital technology of course you know digital became a thing somewhere else because once the genies out of the bottle you kind of put it back and Kodak made a ton of money from selling their patents from the royalties they got from their patents on digital technology when those patents ran out about two three two or three years later they went bankrupt that's called finite thinking if I'm a leader at an organization which is finite it's tough to just say all right I'm gonna lead like an infinite leader now I'm going to make my organization an infinite organization are there sort of practical steps that one can go through as opposed to just saying like think differently yeah of course that of course this is where I'm you know James carci articulated this original concept of the finite and infinite and what I hope to do is is take his basic premise which is a perspective of the world and offer steps in which we can actually take to lead within this infinite world so having a just cause having trusting teams having a worthy rival the ability to make an existential flex and and then ultimately having the courage to lead or other other are the essential five steps that that have to be taken in order to lead and if you leave any of those out you you run the risk of sliding back into the into the finite game how has it been for you going through those steps you know some of them have been a reinforcement like oh good we do this and some of them have like move we need to do better and you know one of the things that's nice about the work that I do is it you know our team like when they get the ideas they they grab on to them and they look for all the ways in which we can not only embrace them and internalize them but how we can better share them as well so it's you know we are a company of constant improvement that we don't we don't have any illusions that we're the best but we're trying to be better every day and I'm very proud of the fact that we're on a journey of advancing our movement advancing our cause and and that's that's that is about as good as anyone can do which is completely fixated on the cause and looking for all the ways in which to improve internally and externally and how you do that so I you know we're we're on an infinite journey and it and the concept has given me the the not only the confidence but the guideposts to understand that it's not just crazy idealism this is actually the way the world works the world what like I said we are unwitting players in the infinite game and we don't get to choose it's like you don't get to choose whether you whether you obey gravity today or not like you have to work within its bounds and the infinite game is the same way it's it's it's um it's a force to be reckoned with it's not it's not rules of a game we don't get to change it you can change the rules of a game you don't get to change the rules of the infinite game it's like I said it's more like a force that we have to we have to cope with and for those who accept the force you can build airplanes and for those who reject the force you can flap your arms when you jump off a cliff and it'll feel amazing for a while and then you'll hit the ground well I'll choose the former Simon thank you so much for your time thank you very much for speaking with you my pleasure thank you [Music]

Channel: Inc.

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Keywords: Inc. (Magazine), Inc.com, Small Business, Entrepreneurship, Business, Entrepreneur (Profession), Startup, Leadership, simon sinek, sinek, find your why, leadership advice, leadeship tips, how to lead, how to be successful, successful people, start a business, team building, simon sinek talk, simon sinek interview, shark tank, The Infinite Game, busines advice

Id: Ar20m23XY_c

Length: 16min 17sec (977 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2018