The Infinite Game: Chapters 10 & 11 | Book Club with Simon

hello everyone and welcome back to book club uh this is the final book club we have for the infinite game where's my copy it's somewhere around here the infinite game um so i'm a little sad but as you all know we added a spontaneous additional book club for together is better which we're going to do on the 21st august 21st same time 1pm eastern um and uh so it'll give you two weeks to read together is better um and uh it's a lovely little book and we can do that because quite frankly if i'm honest i didn't understand because it's like the highlight of my week um we are live on linkedin facebook youtube and twitter we have people coming in from around the world really exciting hello scottsdale arizona hello cutter hello new york uh hello ethiopia uh uh india um australia man you're up early in the morning uk colombia man this always blows my mind arizona um philippines i've eaten balut well i tried to then i got a little bit grossed out and i didn't eat it um uh it's so i i just love how we're all here together south africa west virginia turkey uh the netherlands uh just such a fantastic uh grouping of everyone um as everyone knows book club is not about reading a book it is about coming together and doing something with each other so i hope you've enjoyed it and enjoyed the conversations um thanks for sending in your questions we're going to be going through two things today chapters 10 and 11 of course a little bit at the end uh which is existential flexibility and the courage to lead so um i thought i would have a little special guest today um are we good on special guests we're good and special guest yes okay i'm gonna assume we are i don't know um so hopefully this will work um an organization that has publicly stated that they want to be infinite minded which is airbnb the ceo of airbnb brian chesky um a short while ago about over a year ago actually he made a public announcement that he wants his company to be infinite minded so i thought what an opportunity to talk to brian um uh and ask him how he found the courage to buck the system so i think let's get brian in here and have a little chat with him about courage to lead an existential flexibility hey there he is brian how are you how are you doing good to see you back today thank you so much for that yes long time to talk good to see you it's good to see you too um i know you guys been going through uh some very hard times uh one thing which i don't think people realize you know you're in the travel industry you're you you your business lost eighty percent of its revenue in eight weeks which is just astonishing um and unfortunately you had to make some really difficult decisions and ask some people to transition away what i love about you and i just have to say this is i use your company as the blueprint for other companies that are struggling on how to treat people with dignity in this hard time you were generous with people my favorite thing is you set up an entire website was it airbnb.com talent yeah and with 500 000 people so yeah i thought we basically told employees um so i'll just jump in but like so many people they think um they do three things they try to give severands and you know sometimes they they they go they give they don't quite go as far as they could and you gotta go as far as you can the way they communicate they hold back like they either don't give them all the information or they just kind of hold their emotions back no one wants to see that like you want to know leaders have a heart because that tells you they care about you and you're going to be okay but the last thing is we thought there's something that doesn't cost a lot of money we can do what we can to help them get jobs and my co-founder joe had a great idea he said what if we took our recruiting team and we made them like equivalent of a job placement helping uh people leaving and then we took it a step further and we said what if we allowed everyone to opt in to post their profiles so recruiters can contact them 500 000 people eventually contacted them it's unbelievable i know we we we were looking for some help and we went to airbnb.com talent and we reached out to someone and they'd already found a job so it was fantastic i just love that you you did it with dignity and that's the most important thing the thing i wanted to talk to you about was some time ago you made a very public announcement um that you wanted airbnb to be an infinite minded organization um which is a big deal i've had conversations with ceos behind the scenes where they've expressed interest but nobody does it publicly all the pressures on businesses these days are to be finite minded from your investors from marketplace sometimes even internally and uh you're not public now but if you ever do the pressure becomes even more overwhelming right you finite minded how did you find the courage to basically buck the system uh and and make this public announcement of the kind of company you want to build i just kind of started with a couple maybe three realizations the first is the companies i admired um they they were enduring companies you know like i don't know like apple you know or disney or you name the company um the second is when you're a founder and you start a company i mean i don't have children but you know you know it is like your baby the last thing you want to do is outlive your child and the third thing is like like if you have a purpose you have to ask yourself well like i guess it's okay to be finite minded if you have a purpose and that purpose you achieve but if if that purpose is an ideal that you're constantly pursuing then at some point if you don't keep pursuing it it doesn't happen and i felt like the thing that we were doing or the thing we're trying to do is try to you know bring people together connect them so they can feel like they belong i just think they're so i think that's something that people are yearning for now more than ever and we have not even scratched the surface and then you know you and i talked and um you you you'd obviously you said what you've written in the book and i always thought to myself you know it's really weird that we we cover business the way we cover sports like who's winning who's losing uh by the way a lot of the same people who like the stock market like sports and so i understand why the stock market and sports business and sports seem similar they're not similar at all i mean even this idea of competition i mean competition exists but in the technology industry one of the things we learn is that you're not all fighting for the same pie the whole point of technology is to grow pies that's kind of what this industry does for the most part and so you used to tell me like it's not about like winning or losing it's about being ahead or being behind and we have the most unbelievable examples of companies that seem like they were in the brink and they're now and so i don't actually think it took a lot of it didn't take a lot of courage for me um it just took logic well i i appreciate that you followed that logic i mean it's i think you're you're underselling yourself that logic is clear to a lot of ceos but they shrug their shoulders and say it's the system or what am i supposed to do or you know i i wish i could change it so so what i love is you're a young company with young leadership who who is saying the future of business has to be different and you're and you're taking the lead so i i appreciate your your position so much i don't think it's as hard as like it seems really scary to like kind of go out on a limb at first but the thing is that actually like like who the hell it wants to cheer on companies like just like it's like driving their car at the edge of a constant cliff like who wants to do that we and do we really want to live in a world with all kinds of company like i actually think there's a lot of support for an idea of a company just enduring like when when did that become controversial it's such a good point as you've as you after you made the announcement and you've been making the decisions to be more infinite minded um were there some things that were easier than you expected and were there some things that were bigger challenges than you except expected yeah um what was easy was for everyone to say they agreed with it because it seems like almost impossible to disagree with the concept like well if you don't agree that you want to have like a kind of intimate or enduring time rise and you're saying yeah i want the music to stop well who wants to say that the hard part is actually changing how you do things yeah yeah i want to be infinite i want to like make the real better place i want to do the right thing now let's still do these 10 things the way they've always been done yeah and so i think what gets very very hard is to say change the score card about what success is because if you say something and you talk a certain way you got to start walking that certain way yeah it means that like you know how you run your board meetings like what metrics you have who's on your board and like the things you pursue like they all have to change and the moment you start changing mechanisms that's when you start to really feel some of the you start to feel like feel that right yeah it's the tangible actions yeah one of the other ways people actually agree with you not when you say something but when you try to do something right right that that ain't that the truth ain't that the truth um uh also uh when covert hit um you know we're talking about existential flexibility uh this week um a lot of organizations were forced to pivot and some struggled they they were just grasping for straws double downing on their old business models and and they put themselves at the center of the equation how are we going to survive how are we going to make more money those are the companies that struggle to pivot airbnb pivoted reasonably quickly producing these live online experiences um can you sort of walk us through sort of how that decision was made uh i i assume you you fell back on your just cause you fell back on on that ideal that you have and you just found a new way to do it just talk about how that how it happened and how quickly it happened well first of all it starts with knowing what what business you're in and our we're not in we're not we didn't start this company to be a travel company we didn't start this company get into real estate joey and i started this company because we're deeply passionate about connecting people and belonging and so when you do that you say well there's many ways to connect you think we invented all the ways that people could connect of course we hadn't so you start with that the second thing you do is you just have to have a mindset you know andy grove um one of the founders of intel and he said uh bad companies are destroyed by a crisis good company survive account racist but great companies are defined by a crisis i want us to be that third bucket and you know what so much of its mindset if you think you're going to win if you think that this is going to define you in a positive way and you're going to learn something from it and it's going to make you stronger it kind of happens right like so much of your mindset of the leader becomes the psychology the organization and that psychology really becomes a collective consciousness that mana it it becomes real and so so that was the thing and we said every single opportunity is a moment we have to pivot move fast so what actually happened was first of all you have to have the mindset a mindset of hope of optimism of resiliency that we're going to get through this and now we're going to get through this but every one of these crisis is going to lead to a new point of innovation let's look for moments and a moment happen we uh with social distancing we had to shut down in person experiences everybody's known for homes but we also have three-hour activities that you can book with people all over the world do really cool activities they got paused suddenly you know we started doing listening sessions with our host it's important by the way to listen and be curious and some of the you know i don't think it's much in life you have to have ideas as much as be a receiver for ideas like it's not my job to have an idea and it's not our job for any of us having ideas i think we need to be receivers we're like radio antennas like we just gotta get on the right signal and and they'll tell you people will tell you things and people told us they want to host um but they can't do it in person can they offer them online at first i thought to myself no you can't offer them online we're about connection and connections in the real world then i thought to myself well that's the case there's not going to be a lot of connection anytime soon so i quickly realized and we quickly realized yeah we should get in on this and um within 14 days we pivoted the entire product line to offer online experiences so now you can do we have 800 experiences 200 olympians so we did a nine-year partial olympia with the olympics 200 olympians including jackie joyner kersey you may remember from the 9th sure olympics and and then we had um tony hawk didn't experience um so they did these like activities and you actually can meet them and go on kind of remotely be on experience with them and so we did that but i think so much of it as turning on a dime i never wanted to just be focused on survival if you focus survival that's probably all you're going to get and so i said i don't want to focus on survival and so while all these other companies i saw were like kind of you know like just shuttering their businesses and just in defensive mode and preservation mode i think preservation mode is a very dangerous place to be and i think the more resources the company accumulates the more they start worrying about losing things like a parent with an overactive amygdala worrying if the child is gonna like and putting the helmet on the child before they go outside you're worried something's gonna happen and some point they never live their life right you gotta like the same thing with a company you yeah you got to be like concerned but not so concerned that you protect the company from itself and you're afraid to do anything and you're just preserving resources and and actually that's the worst possible thing ironically for shareholders right shareholders need the company to grow right so this weird like obsession sometimes um that some people have with serving shareholders it's not actually it's not it's not in the shareholders best interest they need companies to create value and therefore they need to be focused on doing new things people love that's what needs to happen to create value i love it brian i i know your day is back to back today i am so grateful that you took time to stop in with us and show us what courage to lead and what existential flexibility looks like in the real world uh such a pleasure such an honor thanks so much for taking the time oh thank you simon well that was a treat for me i gotta tell ya you know to to somebody working at the scale of airbnb to hear what goes through his mind uh and how he thinks about his business you understand that existential flexibility for and and i wrote about it but what fun to hear it uh and by the way uh uh i didn't know what he was gonna say uh so uh but so much fun to hear that when we talk about existential flexibility for the leader who makes that existential flex they actually think the risk is not flexing he actually said it wasn't that hard for the for the rest of the world who's afraid to make those flexes it seems crazy but for the leader that actually makes that flex they actually see the greater risk in not blowing things up they see the greater risk of not flexing um and and i so appreciate um even his his statement of courage um you know he's i think he's he's humble about it um but uh how he he he resorted to listening and we've talked about that a few times throughout this book um which is you don't have to if you're the leader you don't have to have all the ideas and i think too many leaders think that they have to solve all the problems and and they didn't um they didn't actually come up with the basis of the idea of these live online experiences they thought it wasn't possible you heard him say it he's when when the host came and said we want to do this he said well you can't it's impossible but what they did was they listened they heard what people wanted to do and they simply pivoted their business to provide that platform um my expectation i would i would i expect to happen i don't know this i haven't talked to brian about it but what i expect what will happen which is once we go back to somewhat of a normal world where we can travel again that that airbnb will probably have a blended business they'll probably have both i don't think this will be something they abandoned i mean and i think that's the sign of a good existential flex that you're not doing it to simply put a band-aid on the times but rather you found a new way to market and a new way to spread value we've certainly gone through this ourselves you know we couldn't rely on live events anymore we now have our live online classes and i can guarantee you it's here to stay um we think it's actually a wonderful way to spread the message um so very grateful to brian thank you very very much for joining us that was really wonderful um let's take some questions from the outside world from everywhere ohio has won um here's one from rubix rubix asked me what happened to the open playbook man you've been following my stuff for a long time thank you rubix back in the early days when i was first experimenting and talking about the infinite game and the principles of the infinite game and developing an infinite mindset i used to talk about having an open playbook um uh but as many of you who who follow my work may know um i think i do all my thinking out loud so if you go back and look at early versions of everything you'll see me trying to work through the ideas and work out the ideas and sometimes i develop and then and they grow and change and so i realized open playbook was actually not quite accurate it wasn't just this open-mindedness and that's when i changed the term and somewhat of the definition of an open playbook to existential flexibility um i think it's because it was more profound and more robust than what i was a tinkering with with open playbook but rubik's gold star for for for catching that i absolutely love that hello saudi arabia scotland uh montevideo amazing iran um uh lovely to see you all okay let's do some more questions uh we have a question here from get your flex on book club love it from nancy bertulli um how do we know when it is time to make an existential flex and how do we find the courage to bet the farm um so how do you know when you when it's time to make an existential flex so existential flexes happen when there's political changes technological changes cultural changes and we realize that our business and whatever we're selling whatever we're offering sometimes our culture is actually if we if we if we follow out the logic not viable um and you you read about the example of kodak um the invention of the digital camera you know the the engineer who developed the digital camera who invented the digital camera for kodak back in the mid-1970s that's how old that technology is um he said in 10 or 20 years there'll be no no film cameras you can just follow the logic um and it was the senior leadership who chose to put blinders on and so uh uh any customer focused uh vision focused er just cause focus leader it's kind of obvious quite frankly um i mean it was if you go back to the example i gave of steve jobs and apple pivoting to the the graphic user interface you know an organization that's obsessed with making things simple to use for a customer the technology is out of the bag they didn't invent it but they could they could you could follow the logic that that this thing is easier and better than having to learn an entire computer language to use a personal computer and so why not be uh on the front of the wave rather than the back of the wave um so i think for if you have a good just cause um if you have a clear sense of vision of where you want the organization to go and what you're trying to advance i i mean i i can't i wish i could give you a better answer it's kind of obvious you know the and and you have discussions with your with with your people in your company and it's kind of obvious to everybody because we're all vision focused on the vision and then so when you find the courage you sort of turn around to the people to the left of you and turn to the right of you like you know we're gonna have to do this yeah i know we're gonna have to do this you know it's gonna hurt us in the short term yeah i know it's gonna hurt us in the short term do you think we should do this yeah i think we should do this and you do it the courage comes from checking with the people to the left and checking with the people to the right and everybody goes this is way more exciting and what you often find is that when the change is made that's it's like it's kind of like it's kind of like jumping off a high dive right the hard part isn't the falling into the water the hard part is just the initial little leap of faith a little jump so once the decision is made actually the excitement kicks in um and and that's sort of a remarkable thing you would think would be fear and but it's actually not once somebody makes the decision the excitement kicks in that's definitely been the case at airbnb once they made the decision the excitement went up from internal and from hosts uh good question uh sarah hembree how are you from tallahassee florida she asks uh our book club is primarily middle and high school teachers along with parents and community members uh along with parents and community members education the epitome of what could be the infinite game is a pivotal moment right now yes it is if small pockets of schools and leaders take the chance to shift the idea of purpose of education can their existential flex impact the larger national system with uh which focuses more on finite goals amen amen amen it was just what brian said uh he was quoting andy grove the founder of intel which is for bad companies a crisis will destroy them i don't remember the exact quote for good companies uh something else and for great companies they'll reinvent and i think uh never let a good crisis go to waste um and uh one of the things that i think has is forced education to do in this crisis is look at how it teaches of course education is an infinite game school is finite but education should be last should last our entire lives i would hate to think that people think their learning is done when they graduate high school or college um uh and i think it's forced uh uh it's kind of like what happened when the internet showed up uh in publishing or in movies which is it forces you to look inward and say what actually do we do um and how do we do it and i think that that schools have mixed bag and whether they've really properly embraced uh online and simply transferring all the classes to online i mean that that's not it either but it's some sort of this blended model and i think the more forward-thinking school districts are sitting down and saying okay the world has changed we have to equip young people to be productive members of society and teach them basic skills and give them a basic education so that they can survive given that the world is the way it is if we were starting a school from scratch day if we were a startup if we said okay we're starting a school from scratch how would we build our school for this marketplace and i think to reinvent oneself to for for schools to reinvent themselves it's an amazing opportunity and i think because of the structure of school and the the standardized tests and the short-term metrics i think that opportunity really didn't exist in the past it was just just you couldn't do it unless you were a private school but i think that for all schools public private and otherwise um it's an amazing amazing opportunity now to actually re-imagine what education could look like into the 21st century um i hope those conversations are happening and just like brian explained invite outsiders invite students and imma and to reimagine what school could look like um take information in doesn't mean you have to do what they say but it means you get to take in all the new ideas and something may spark some inspiration um i'll add one editorial piece i think one things that all schools should be doing and could be doing um is building leadership education in for their students and leadership education in for their teachers and administrators uh people go into administration they go into leadership and nobody teaches them how to lead um we should be teaching listening skills to students we should be teaching effective confrontation to students we should be dealing with teaching how to deal with stress to students these are skills that they have to deal with in the in the future world and they are not being prepared for them um i'd rather see that happen than calculus uh by the way speaking from a non-mathematician you're getting a lot of questions sorry i'm getting questions about what my t-shirt is it's just it's a it's a japanese print i like japanese stuff um i saw it on uniqlo it was on sale so i got it um uh okay how do we put these ideas into a company that isn't flexible so the most common question i used to get was what about these millennials and i did a thing i did a video and answered that and that question went away which is kind of good the most common question that i get now every single time the most common question is what if i believe in the infinite mindset and senior leadership is so finite minded how do i how do i what do i do um well if we adjust to an infinite mindset we accept that um a we can affect we can't change people right we can only change our own behavior we can't force senior leadership to change especially if we have no direct contact with them but we can choose to become the leaders we wish we had right so the whole idea is say is to is to work within the system you've got of course but to say okay we're going to build an infinite minded team and so amongst the people you work with and it doesn't matter if you're in a leadership position or not remember leadership has nothing to do with rank leadership is the responsibility to take care of those around us so you can take care of your boss too hey boss you okay during this cobit how are you um um and start embracing those uh those practices you know if the organization doesn't have a good just cause tell your team what your just causes and say why you love this job and how this job is helping you advance your just cause start building trusting teams start making the people you work with feel like someone has their back that someone cares about them as human beings that you create a space where they can be open and honest without judgment um uh you study your worthy rivals so that you can be a better leader but also ask the team what other teams inside the company are better than we are so that at certain things so that we can become an even better team not because we want to beat them but because we want to improve build that sense of constant improvement into the team um be willing to change certain things you know very often companies do things because that's the way they've always been done but nobody's ever asked does it have to be done this way and nobody ever asks can i change it and very often the answer is we don't know why it's done this way and yes you can change it ask the questions i tell you one quick funny story as a side about asking questions long ago when i had a job uh i worked at a large ad agency and it was a fairly common experience where my boss would come into my office and say the client wants this by wednesday get it done i'd be like it's impossible to get this done by wednesday and he would say i don't know what to tell you you have to get the client wants it by wednesday so one day i called the client and i said hey i got this thing that you asked for when do you need it by uh because they said you have to have it by wednesday and they went no i can have it by friday or monday that's totally fine it's because somebody said when do you want it they said wednesday and we went okay and then it became the point is ask a question sometimes we have more flexibility and more freedom than we think we do and then what ends up happening is you build this wonderful high-performing team if you have an open-minded group of leaders even if they're finite-minded they're going to look at what you're doing in your high-performing team with higher loyalty better relationships and they're going to say what are you guys doing down there and they may want to learn from you if they're completely just you know in their own world and short-term metric-driven um they'll just leave you alone because you're high-performing um and eventually some of the people will leave that group and go join other teams they'll either move on or get promoted out and they'll bring everything they've learned and they'll take it to those teams and they'll build high-performing infinite-minded teams and eventually the tail wags the dog unfortunately we don't know how long it takes depends on the organization depends on the culture depends on the people but the tail can wag the dog i saw it happen with a hundred thousand person organization and it took two years which i think is unbelievably quickly and it was completely without senior leadership's help we saw the whole organization pivot just because the people started to embrace new ideas uh sarah nicola the raf girls from swindon how are you uh you've mentioned some small companies that have made an existential flex in response to covid uh what major companies do you think have managed it uh and who are the ones who are truly playing the infinite game um i think that well we heard from airbnb i mean i think that is a great example of a very large company and even despite the fact that for very practical and unfortunate reasons realistic reasons survivable ex literally existential reasons they've had to ask some people to transition off they've done it in a way that um as we talked about with great dignity um other big companies i was you know i was quite impressed by nike in the early days of covid they were like the first company that started redefining um uh being at home and talking about how we can still be athletes at home i was pretty impressed by that in terms of uh what other big companies have have made a good pivot that's a great question nothing comes to mind off the top of my head i will post something i think that's a good question about big companies the problem is is that big companies especially public companies they they struggle to pivot and maybe one of the reasons i'm struggling to that something i'm struggling to have something come to mind immediately is because it's probably few and far between what tends to happen with large companies is they tend to knuckle down they tend to double down on on the old or wait it out or try and just cut expenses i think i think television and movies are they were a little late to the game in the pivot but i think we're starting to see it there they're starting to learn how to adjust things are becoming smaller and more efficient they're realizing they can make things from a distance which they never thought were possible so i think we're starting to see a little a little bit of that um what's that okay um moving on uh my question is how do you manage employee motivation during this period somebody asked me about sorry i'm gonna interrupt somebody asked me about netflix i don't think netflix pivoted i think netflix their business just works really well for the time we're in i mean it's you know i'm not sure they actually did they do they really can profoundly change the course of their business uh i don't think so i just think that uh kind of like amazon uh it's like boy boy does your business benefit from from this day and age so i think that was just good luck quite frankly um sorry sorry sarah what was the question um from amit yes how do you manage motivation during this period how do we manage employee motivation in such a period of uncertainty um we have to remember that we're all human beings and we're going through trauma and so if you had a friend i should assume everybody here has at least one friend you're in a book club so i know you have at least one um uh what would you do for a friend um we have to ex we have to accept that everyone will go through the trauma of covet everyone there will be no avoiding it there will be no compartmentalizing it some people go through it early some people go through it late some people it will linger some people it will go quickly some people will be recurring but we're all going through some sort of trauma and just to know that somebody is there to care for us um the most that's the most important thing if somebody's performance is down or you see them looking a little bit despondent or a little bit quiet on on on a zoom call on a meeting um immediately just pick up the phone when that meeting is done and be like hey you were a little bit quieter they just want to check in on you make sure you're okay don't expect them to come and open up to you and and all of a sudden you're going to become their therapist um you know and if they don't open up to you it's fine the most important thing is that they know that you care and they know that you're there um and just keep doing that you know motivation is going to go up and down it has for me it has for everybody on this call it's gonna go up and down and uh you know it's a delicate balance of needing to to to continue to to um give people the tools they need and help support them so they can do a good job but if we see a little step back that it doesn't mean that they're a problem that means they have a problem and so this is where good leadership it's it's like good parenting you know sometimes you yell at a kid and sometimes you don't sometimes you sit down with me like hey what's on your mind and it's knowing to recognize the signs and that find that delicate balance um and and and the motivation will come and go then what we want to do is keep them inspired uh the motivation will come and go so that is normal that's the other thing it's normal nothing is abnormal here because it's a weird time um here's one that i love um so we got a note from uh two book clubs that are frequent uh attendees and have been from from the start with y days uh the no stress book club and the international uh and they identified each other as worthy rivals which i really love um and what they decided to do is choose to form a partnership they've actually joined book clubs they've actually now coordinate together i love that here's the question they asked uh from ashley freeman and uh ying pan uh from the two book clubs respectively um for those of us who work in strongly finite uh minded organizations who want to take up your just cause for more inspired and fulfilled world what initial steps would you advise we take so that eventually the tail wags a dog well we talked about this a little bit uh before commit yourself to the path of constant improvement i think that is such an important thing um uh you can this is the funny thing we have more freedom than we think we have you can actually invent your own metrics now they don't have to be formal metrics but you can actually invent your own metrics so for example if all of the metrics inside our organization are finite and short term we can within our own little team we can create um uh the person the person we all want to be more like a award and we can all write essays and who we nominate and within our team we can recognize the person we want to be more like so and we can give them a little statue and say we all want to be more like you because you embody the values um that that we believe in um and and we can do little things we can we can create little subcultures um where we're embracing all the concepts of the infinite of the infinite minded organization um so yeah you just do it on smaller scale um hello yorkshire um um given the current pandemic situation how do you maintain focus on and ignore the distractions given the current pandemic situation how do we stay focused ignore the distractions um i mean turning off the news is probably a good idea um you know one of the things we have to be aware of is is to try to divide your mind i know it sounds silly but this is what i've tried to do which is you know i mean two i mean i try to maintain two mindsets which is mindset one is i'm going to be informed i want to be informed i'm going to turn on the fire hose that is the news and everybody with an opinion um and i'm going to sort of take it in and listen to some of it take some of it with a grain of salt try and find middle grounds i also i've i'm i i listen to news from both sides of the political spectrum i want to know how it's been reported on both sides and i sort of find something in the middle i have my favorite news sources i like the bbc because they're non-commercial uh uh i like non-commercial news um um and that's sort of one side and then i have sort of okay what we're trying to do in advance our own cause um and that's where you sort of you remain stubbornly focused on on why you're doing what you're doing the cause that you're trying to advance and asking ourselves our own difficult questions um the worst thing that we can do is is keep changing our mind on a daily basis because the news cycle is changing or because there's new information and this sort of whiplash creates uncertainty and uncertainty is very unnerving for human beings we can deal with good news we can even deal with bad news it's uncertainty that is just absolutely stress creating for human beings when i don't know what's going to happen that's where stress sets in if something's bad this is what you know this is you know when we put people through known stress like here's existential flexibility we're going to make a flex everyone's like all right we can figure this out even covid when covet happened what we wanted our leaders to say was this is bad we're going to give you the the most current information we have we're going to keep updating it some of it we're going to get wrong some of it we're going to keep you posted no one knows everything because this is entirely new but we're going to try and give you as much information oh and by the way this is our long-term goal get people healthy make sure that it's safe open an economy making sure that it's done in a responsible way and we're going to try and do those things as quickly as we can but we're going to keep you posted because we're not going to sacrifice either for fear of making it worse that's all we needed we needed somebody to tell us that we've got a long-term plan and then just keep us informed and what they know it's the whiplash and the constant you know the sides fighting with each other but what's right and wrong which is creating unbelievable uncertainty for us we don't know who to believe or what to believe and so what does that do it increases stress and so what we need at work is some sort of certainty we need our leaders to give us some sort of vision some sort of direction this is our cause our cause has not changed how we're going to advance our cause has changed because of covid but the cause itself remains fixed we need something fixed to make us feel inspired uh what else we have here uh do a few more questions um okay you know what i want to do i never do this but there were some there were some things that i was reading in this chapter that i wanted to actually highlight because i thought they were actually kind of interesting [Music] right at the beginning of existential flexibility page 186 if you're reading along this is what i wrote existential flex does not happen at the founding of the company it happens when the company is fully formed and functioning to all finite minded is observant it is existential because okay we talked about that the point is because it's not about uh uh and i even said it it's not about the energy at a startup time it's recreating startup energy when the organization is fully functional and so for organizations that are successful in their existential flex there should be a lot of excitement because just like a startup why is a st why is the energy in a startup so exciting because we have no resources all we have is vision and we have each other and that's the excitement well with existential flex you're recreating that kind of energy midstream which means you need vision that outstrips your resources and you need people who who care about that vision and who are in it for the for the for the wild ride and so there should be high morale in the middle of an existential flex um we're going through our own and i'm watching it it's really kind of amazing to write about something theoretically and then be in the middle of it and as we go through hours it's been really kind of amazing to watch the uh morale stay high on our team as well i also wrote on page 200 so how do we find the courage uh to change our mindset number one we can wait for a life-altering experience that shakes us to our core and challenges the way we see the world well congratulations we all got one um you know i said that was something we couldn't rely on because it was so uncertain but literally the whole world has been shaken um and so again amazing opportunity to change our mindset amazing opportunity for experimentation okay let's do another question here's goodwin um regarding chapter 10 how do you not blow yourself up too early or too late ooh that's such a good one who's that from linkedin user well hello linkedin user uh fan of all your work uh the question was if you're gonna make an existential flex and you have the courage to make it and you're willing to blow up ever blow up the company the question is how do you know when to blow it up so you don't blow up too soon that you hurt yourself but you don't wait too long that doesn't happen i mean there you there there's your answer uh at some point you gotta jump uh you can hesitate a little bit but at some point you're gonna jump and quite frankly the hardest part is just making the decision um uh i know from my own experience i i tend to err on being just a little slow i don't mean months sometimes days or weeks because sometimes just waiting a few days just waiting a beat new information is revealed sleeping on it a little bit it should not be an impulsive decision the realization you can come to the realization quickly like oh we're going to have to do this but don't execute it the next day even though you're 100 certain it has to happen give it a little give it a little beat and make sure you're talking about it with the people who are going to help you do it if you're responsible for the organization probably other executives because what you want to make sure is that you covered a few bases and like i said you might have some new information revealed on how to do it responsibly so yes once you come to the mental realization it has to be done you don't want to wait too long you just want to wait a couple beats um and then the hardest part is pulling the trigger and just like like anything that requires a little bit of courage a bungee jump or jumping out of a plane with a parachute um the hardest part is the first step and then once you've taken the leap it's it's actually more exciting than your than you'll then you'll realize so you're gonna have to make that jump at some point sooner rather than later uh let's take one more question uh here is kihahan she's 15 years old from south korea oh my god i love it oh sorry kia sorry sorry kiha he is 15 years old uh from south korea i'm your biggest fan and follower of your vision thank you i have a question on behalf of my mom and my dad is it possible to create trust between company and employees when there are cultural and lifelong engravings of the notion companies equal villains and workers equal victims if so and how would the lifestyle and systems change be worked on okay so good and i think unfortunately this affects a lot of countries this is a really good question which is we now view things like government as a villain we now view things like companies as villains especially public companies um we talk about you know when you ever the ad the in front of a a term it becomes sort of angry like the corporations corporations are the corporations it's sort of filled with anger right um and seeing workers as victims how do you change it well how do you eat an elephant one mouthful at a time and and what we need is this those few organizations who believe that it's different that that believe that organizations have a responsibility to their people and what you want is new narratives coming out of companies the reason uh workers often see themselves as victims is because sometimes that's how they're treated and so when they go home they go oh they're beating us up again or they're taking advantage or they laid us off again so that the boss can protect you know their bonus again right and we see it on the news and we see ceos doing they're having their companies doing a terribly terribly unethical things and when forced to defend their actions they say we we follow the law right like oh good i'm so proud my mic the company i work for follows the law even though they're highly unethical um and so what it requires is those leaders to do things differently airbnb is a good example there are things that are happening differently they're redefining what business can look like we're talking what you're talking about kiha is making a societal shift what we're talking about is making um a systemic and cultural shift now the fact that the most common question i get is i believe in the infinite mindset but my boss doesn't is a sign that we have too many finite minded leaders right now leading organizations which leads to companies being seen as villains and workers feeling like victims the but the fact that the people asking this question means this next generation of leadership wants to change it and so we want to empower them we want to keep it going and it will change um but it's going to take time it's going to take time but we have to commit ourselves to that change how do you get into shape start going to the gym and eating healthy is it easy no does it take time yes you commit yourself to the process and that's what this whole thing is about this whole book is about committing ourselves to a process with absolute certainty that the process works if we just stick to it and the problem is sometimes the metrics lag like working out like making friends like falling in love like sometimes we don't know what's going on until the person says i love you or maybe we can't even see that we're getting into shape we keep looking in the mirror and we see no we see nothing changing in our bodies and if we don't have those immediate reactions we sometimes quit and so a large part of what this book is about is committing to the process of building an infinite mindset knowing that it is imperfect it is human it is messy it is difficult it's going to require help that's what this is about um i have to wrap up i don't want to wrap up i'm having so much fun um speaking of committing to that process um i asked the team to make a class for our online classes about what it takes to live with an infinite mindset so they've done that and so we have a new class uh that is all about what it takes to play with an infinite mindset which i'm so proud that we built reading a book is one step having conversations is another step and anything we can do it in part to help the class is not live yet but if you want you can go click and sign up and we'll send you an email when it does come live i think we're going to put a link in the chat there there it is uh it's a complicated link but anyway if you go click on the link um we'll let you know when that class goes live i'm very excited about that um and it's one of those things that we're pivoting to we're like how do we take the contents of a book and actually make it more actionable so very excited about that it's called the infinite game class that's what it's called straight to the point there you go we've got a bunch of other new classes as well um start with why for those people who did the jump start your y class um hugely popular and we decided to do two new versions of them we did we're doing ones especially for veterans um and we're doing one especially for health care professionals we know in this crazy crazy time um in healthcare um nice for healthcare professionals to be able to reconnect with their why and so we've been working with um a trauma nurse uh because she's in the industry and she's been going through covet and being a part of it and she's been working with us to help us um uh build this class so if you're a healthcare professional and want to learn your why we have a class just for you if you're a military veteran who's transitioning um and you want to learn your why we have a class just for you go check it out at simoncynic.com inspire you um two other new classes i'm excited about uh turn adversity into an advantage again we're trying to produce stuff that's relevant to now from harvard professor laura huang uh uh also getting a lot of good feedback on that one and then mindful meditation for focused leadership from gianna biscantini jana biscantini is my coach and uh if uh if you don't know what the power of meditation is to being a leader man let me tell you i i have a meditation practice gianna helps me she's an amazing coach um and so she has mindful meditation specifically for focused leadership uh what else uh as always you know we have a secret book club discount code if you want to take any of our classes just type in the discount code book club rules it's book club rules to get 20 off any of our classes as always and we will be doing another one of these because i don't want to say goodbye and i don't want it to end on august 21st 1 p.m eastern together is better uh it's available in most countries in some countries it has the scented page unfortunately not all countries wasn't my choice but they're um i don't know where here it is one of the pages here it is if you scr if you rub it gently it smells like optimism and if nothing else uh the smell of optimus is really nice in this day and age so we're going to read and talk about uh together is better in a couple of weeks um i think that's about it um just a reminder book club has nothing to do with reading a book it's about doing something together i hope you keep your book clubs going please find another book i can recommend a few if you like but please continue with your book clubs maybe one of you will suggest something and please keep your book clubs going and have your conversations every week um because it's really important to do things together during these times as always take care of yourself take care of each other and i'll see you real soon see you in two weeks

Channel: Simon Sinek

Views: 31,179

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Id: 49uNI7AfgiA

Length: 49min 58sec (2998 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020