Business is an INFINITE GAME | Full Speech

Introduction

Please welcome back Mohammed Khande and welcome Simon Sinek.

[Music] [Applause]

All right, Simon Phoenix, oh this is going to be fun, as I told you yesterday I have no idea what it’s going to go but you know your team told me that I had to say something controversial.

No, we don’t.

Sorry, Simon, many men in this room know who you are, right, you’re quite famous, but let me attribute to a brief intro of Simon. So Simon, you have studied 100 greatest leaders currently running the organization organizations today and what behaviors they display. You’re also best-selling author, right? Start with why, Leaders Eat Last, Together is Better, and The Infinite Game, four books, huh? That’s pretty good, okay, do you have another one coming or that’s it?

My publisher would like me to, yeah, okay, just asking. So we have a lot of things to talk about so listen for all of you in the audience, uh, you can ask questions to the PWC Live app, okay, so we are going to just have a conversation with Simon but any questions you might have I’ll try to, uh, to filter them and you know and we go and you know into a conversation and that’s how we do it and you’ll see also in the PWC Live app the last book that was written by Simon the Anthony game you can now order a free copy of that book to the PWC Live app so everybody here will have the benefit of wonderful, I didn’t get a book from you so. So Simon let me give you a little bit of background on PWC first before we get into the questioning and the team that you have here. So we are a people business, okay, under all the folks that you have here we have about 30 000 people, they are all leaders in this room and we have 30 000 people that are not here today that we have been given the privilege to lead, okay, we are growing very fast we have a very diverse team we have different practices that are represented here but also we have folks that come from outside that John Peter received a couple of hundred of them in this room during the pandemic so imagine very diverse team growing fast putting different businesses together in addition to that we have to constantly reinvent ourselves because of the not pressures but the opportunities that we have in the market with our clients today so the need for reinvention is important right so it is going to be playing very good for us to understand what you mean by the Anthony game I know you wrote that book I watch a few videos also about the infinite game but tell us what do you mean by this infinite game.

The Infinite Game

In the mid 1980s philosopher and theologian by the name of Dr. James cars defined these two types of games finite games and infinite games. A finite game is defined as known players fixed rules and an agreed upon objective football baseball there’s always a beginning middle and an end and if there is a winner then necessarily there have to be losers then you have infinite games infinite games are defined as known and unknown players which means you don’t necessarily know who all the other players are and new players can join at any time the rules are changeable which means every player can play however they want and the objective is to perpetuate the game to stay in the game as long as possible we are players in infinite games every day of Our Lives whether we know it or not there’s no such thing as winning education you can come in first for the finite amount of time you’re at school where we agree upon the time frame and the metrics grades but nobody wins education and though we can keep learning for our whole lives nobody wins Health Care nobody wins global politics and there’s definitely no such thing as winning business but if we listen to the language of so many leaders it becomes abundantly clear that they don’t actually know the game that they’re playing in they talk about being number one or being the best or beating their competition oh we said that too yeah but okay but the question is the question is the question is based on what based upon what agreed upon objectives metrics and time frames clearly your competitors the other players in the game haven’t agreed to your metrics time frames uh or you know or objectives nobody’s agreed what winning looks like you know and so this is a problem because when we play with a finite mindset in an infinite game when we play to win in a game that has no Finish Line uh there are some very predictable and consistent outcomes the big ones are the decline of trust the decline of cooperation and actually the decline of innovation and so there’s a great irony in companies that are trying to reinvent themselves and stay ahead of the curve while Simon simultaneously trying to beat their competition and win and be the best those two are incongruent right um uh I’ll give you an example a silly example um when Circuit City went bankrupt Best Buy didn’t win anything right it didn’t win anything there’s nothing their number one competitor fell out of the game because they ran out of the will and resources to play but Best Buy didn’t win anything they had to keep playing in fact with the rise of Amazon the entire rules of how they played the game had to change and so the reality is is when you play with an infinite mindset you play Not To Beat anyone but ultimately you play uh the only true competitor is yourself which is how do we make our products better this year than what they were last year how do we make our services better this year than.

The Infinite Game (continued)

…better this year than it was last year, how do we make our culture stronger this year than it was last year, and it’s a game of constant constant Improvement but there’s no such thing as winning. But you mentioned five attributes, right, of yeah, creating that infinite mindset because I’m sure that is something that we have to practice, yeah, right, what are the five attributes?

So to convert to an infinite mindset or embrace an infinite mindset as you said, there are five uh, there are five practices, number one is you have to uh, Advance, adjust, cause, the second one is build trusting teams, uh, the third is study your worthy Rivals, your fourth is have a capacity for existential flexibility and the final one is to um, uh, have the courage to lead.

So really quickly um, you know, a lot of companies have vision statements or mission statements and they usually sound similar and they’re not helpful to be the best damn to be the most respected the most preeminent blah blah blah the highest value for our clients blah blah blah can you can you shut down the monitors please shut them the slides you know [Laughter] it’s very nice being here thank you very much um and it’s not wrong it’s just not useful like nobody nobody oh man no I mean like I mean no one no one in your practice a total of zero is waking up every morning and thinking to themselves today’s the day like I’m gonna Advance the mission right it’s he said that yesterday laughs so when I talk about advancing a Just Cause right um a just cause is something a lot more idealistic it’s a statement of the world that you wish that the the way the world you wished it worked the it’s a world that you imagine like we imagine a world that’s PWC we imagine a world in which and then we devote our practice we devote our energy we devote our resources to advance towards that cause and we’re going to bring our clients with us the work that we do takes us closer to that course so I’ll give you an example so my just cause our organizations just cause we imagine a world so you can see there’s that Forward Thinking which as an aside which is why we call it vision is because you have to be able to see it right so we imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired feel safe wherever they are and end the day fulfilled by the work that they do that is our cause that is a cause so just that we would be willing to sacrifice in order to advance closer towards that ideal we will never get there it is an ideal okay and you can look at organizations or leaders that have made profound impact in their Industries or in the world you’ll see these just causes whether it’s all men are created equal right it’s a just cause imperfect in all in its own way but you can see a nation striving um I have a dream literally imagining that one day little black children will hold hands on the playground with little white children imperfect in its own uh in in reality but you can see a a nation striving um when Apple and Steve Jobs used to talk about empowering individuals to stand up to Big Brother you can see the attraction to the personal computer because it literally gives power to an individual to compete against a corporation imperfect but a striving and all of these things become striving that become incredibly inspiring for for a Workforce because they feel like they’re contributing to something bigger than themselves but when you think about innovation if you say provide greater value for our clients and it’s not wrong I have to stress it’s not wrong but but when you say innovate around that The Innovation tends to be more features and benefits it tends to be tweaking and efficiencies when you say be the best I don’t even know how you innovate around that right you can’t say some to say somebody you know make innovate so but when you say innovate a way to advance this the ideas can come from anywhere inside the organization and the ideas tend to be a lot bigger okay so it’s not that those things are wrong that what I’m what I’m offering are what a a clearer path to embracing an infinite mindset okay right it’s not that the other doesn’t work it doesn’t have value it just has less value in the infinite game okay right that was the first one just go just cause advancing or just advancing you’ll never achieve it it’s an idealized State and even when you hear me say it when you hear people sit it sort of feels like it has more gravitas and it’s proprietary you know it doesn’t sound like every other company’s mission statement okay um uh then I talk about building trusting teams which is essential um because especially when you’re operating at scale 300 000 people trust is absolutely essential senior leadership has to trust uh middle management that has to trust the front line that that they not only understand what we’re here to do but I don’t have to micromanage you right one of my favorite examples of what a trusting team looks like it happened a few years ago when I was on a business trip I went to Las Vegas and they were very nice to put me up at the Four Seasons out there are you sure about business yeah it’s a lovely Hotel um just asking what’s that it was for business right it was for business yes it was it a real business trip um and uh they happen to have a coffee bar in the lobby of the Four Seasons in Vegas and so one afternoon I went and bought myself a cup of coffee and the Barista working that day was a kid named Noah Noah was funny and charming and engaging and I spent far too long buying a cup of coffee because I just so enjoyed talking to Noah so as is my nature I asked Noah um do you like your job and without skipping a beat Noah said I love my job now in my line of work

Continued in the next segment…

Building Trusting Teams

That’s significant, like is rational I like the people I like the I like the work, you know I get paid well I like my job love is emotional it’s a higher order connection right like do you love your wife I like her a lot right [Laughter] it’s clearly clearly a different standard right. So when Noah said I love my job my ears perked up this kid has an emotional connection to his work so immediately I followed up and said tell me specifically what the Four Seasons is doing that you would say to me you love your job and again without skipping a beat Noah said throughout the day managers will walk past me and ask me how I’m doing ask me if there’s anything that I need to do my job better not just my manager any manager and then he said I also work at another hotel and there the managers walked past us and catch us when we do something wrong they’re the managers are always trying to drive performance and make sure we hit our numbers he said there I’d like to keep my head below the radar get through the day and just collect my paycheck only at the Four Seasons do I feel I can be myself now this is the exact same human being working at two different companies and yet our experience of him will be profoundly different not because of him but because of the leadership environment in which he works you know I get this question all the time you know Simon how do we get the most out of our people people are not a towel that you ring them out to see how much you can get out of them you know it’s it’s a it’s it’s it’s that’s a good one right it’s a flawed question the question is how do we create an environment on in which our people can work at their natural best and that is the art of leadership it’s creating environment in which relationships can thrive in which trust can Thrive and we all know what it feels like to be on a trusting team right um it means that we feel psychologically safe enough to raise our hand and say um I made a mistake or I need help or I’m having trouble at home and it’s affecting my work or I’m scared or I don’t know what to do without any fear of humiliation or retribution but rather to say these things with the absolute confidence that someone on our team will rush to support us unfortunately we also all know what it feels like not to work on a trusting team where admitting any of those things could hurt your chances of promotion could hurt your chances of it you could be humiliated and so when we when we work on teams where leadership is creating an environment where there’s where trust is a at a premium we force our people to come to work and lie hide and fake where they’re pretending that they’ve made no mistakes they’re lying hiding and faking and eventually things will crack and things will eventually break and and when you talk about reinvention and you talk about Innovation and you talk about challenging the status quo or whatever it is necessarily there’s risk and necessarily there are mistakes and necessarily there’s stupid ideas and you have to create an environment which that’s good the alternative is everybody playing it safe which is not the way that leads to to best or significant Improvement so this is this is absolutely essential if you want to play in the infinite game because ultimately every single person here will leave the organization or die at some point you know uh circle of life and you’ll be replaced by new people and so the opportunity is to create a company with vision and teams that can Thrive and Outlast every single person here and that is part of the responsibility of leadership is to leave the organization in better shape than you found it which means grooming the Next Generation like one of the primary responsibilities of any leader is to make more leaders and so building trusting teams is absolute is absolutely core to that I find the worthy rival one studying where the arrivals is actually the easiest one to embrace and Implement and I find it kind of fascinating as well in business we talk about having competitors who are your competitors the problem is is that notion of competition is a very finite mindset because competitors are there to be beaten right you beat your competitors in baseball but in the infinite game there are no competitors there’s other players for sure um but unlike in football or baseball in an infinite game you can have two companies that offer relatively the same set of services for…

Worthy Rivalry and Existential Flexibility

You know relatively the same price relatively the same quality and you know a plus and minus here and there and both can do profoundly well make tons of money at the exact same time right. In other words, there’s no winning or losing and so this is why we talk about being the best based on what um and so to try and beat our competition what we’re doing is we’re spending too much time focusing on what they’re doing and not enough time focusing on what we’re doing and so rather to embrace this concept of worthy rivalry where you view all the other players in your industry as Rivals and some of them are worthy of comparison in other words there are other players in your industry other players in the game who do one or many things better than you respect that and admire that because their strengths reveal to you reveal to you your weaknesses and if the if the true only true competitor in the infinite game is yourself then knowing where your weaknesses are is essential because then you can improve upon them and so ask yourselves like who are the other players who when their name comes up it actually makes you insecure angry it’s probably because they’re doing something better you know is their leadership better is their sales team better you know whatever it is their implementation better what new is their marketing better and instead of trying to beat them or get angry respect them learn from them and then go apply the lessons to yourself a game of constant Improvement you can do it tomorrow and by the way your worthy Rivals can change out because sometimes they’re no longer worthy of comparison anymore uh because they’ve screwed up their own business for whatever reason too much finite mindset I guess um uh yeah so you know we had a conversation yesterday with everybody around who our competitors are today yeah and about not fearing our competitors right because to your point be grateful for them yeah be grateful for them sure no let’s not fear them but also understanding that whoever we assume we are competing against today might not be who will be competing against tomorrow right because you always have new players coming to the game that’s what you’re saying well this is the great irony in business because the the funny thing is the competitors that you select it’s an arbitrary list right because no none of the big competitors of the companies that take you down like Myspace didn’t even know Facebook existed you know uh you know all the publishing houses didn’t they ignored Amazon they turned down investing in Amazon you know all the movie companies and all the television stations thought Netflix was cute right they were NBC CBS and ABC and fox were so focused on each other they literally were ignorant so the threats coming from outside and it’s because old thinking with old players and again it’s only because they’re doing what’s familiar you’re taking somebody who’s a senior executive at a company who’s come up through an industry who’s been doing the same thing for 20 or 30 years and now you’re going to say stop all of that there’s new ways of thinking I need you to completely unlearn everything and it’s not that that can’t be done but as human beings we say to ourselves well what I’ve been doing has worked perfectly fine for 30 years I think I know what I’m doing I’m okay thanks very much and that’s dangerous and um I mean Netflix is such a great example because the then CEO of Blockbuster remember them and Blockbuster was the 800 pound gorilla I mean it was the only significant uh National video rental chain in the country right huge company um and we knew this new technology called streaming was available and it wasn’t quite good enough yet which is why Netflix was experimenting with a new pricing model if you remember it was subscription and you could get the DVDs keep them for as long as you want send it back and then they’d replace them and then eventually they knew they knew eventually that would become streaming and the CEO back then uh saw that this was significant and he went to the board and said I think we should experiment with a subscription model and the board would not allow him to make that change you want another reason because 12 of their revenues came from late fees oh wow and they were too afraid to lose 12 of their revenues so instead they lost the whole company and that’s the problem which is sometimes you have to take a short-term hit to innovate especially when it comes with experimenting with new models and the joke was it wasn’t an experiment because another company had already proved that it had validity was working that’s the Folly the Folly was there was no risk they were just short term uh finite thinkers that were thinking about the the all they could think about was losing that 12 percent now the whole company is down and now it doesn’t exist and Netflix is literally redefining the category and I did not invest in Blockbuster so you talked about how do you call it uh organizational flexibility right or agility oh the existential flexibility existential flexibility okay existential flexibility is not like the normal flexibility the day-to-day that you need to do work it is um it is a a business’s ability to make profound 180 degree strategic shift in order to advance that just cause um I think one of the single best examples of what an existential Flex looks like happened back in the late 70s early 80s so I mentioned apple and Steve Jobs Steve Jobs had this vision of empowering individuals to stand up to Big Brother he saw the personal computer is the perfect technology to do that um and uh the jobs in apple had was already a big company ready fast growing company one of the first unicorns um they’d already had success from the Apple One the Apple II jobs was already famous and as is the practice of a lot of Executives they went and visited other companies and jobs and a few of his senior guys went on a tour of Xerox Park out in Menlo Park and Xerox showed them a new technology that they had invented called the graphic user interface which allowed people to use a computer by clicking on a mouse and moving a cursor across a desktop and jobs looked at this new technology that they didn’t invent and said this is profound because right now if you want to use a computer you have to learn how to you know you have to learn a basic code right which means a very small percentage of the population can actually use it and if my ambition is to empower as many individuals as possible then this graphic user interface is something I have no choice to advance my cause it’s obvious that we have to invest in it and so he said

Macintosh’s Influence on Computing

The Macintosh so profoundly changed the course of computing that the entire software of Windows is designed to act like a Macintosh, and the reason a computer is now a household appliance, is because of that decision. They did take a short-term loss and they did take a hit because that’s what happens necessarily when you reinvest, but that’s an existential flex profound strategic shift in order to advance your cause.

Challenges of Making Strategic Shifts

You know, the funny thing was with covid, a lot of companies were forced to do it. In most careers, you’ll do it once, two at the absolute most, but most people go through their careers without having to make an existential flex. It’s a pretty significant shift and it causes a lot of pain and stress to the organization.

Importance of Trust and Just Cause

That’s why you need trusting teams and why you need a just cause because if you have a just cause, this shift is like, of course, we have to make this change, and if you have trusting teams, they go all right, this is going to suck but we’re on board. And if you don’t have the just cause, you don’t have the trusting teams, you’ll probably break the company.

Importance of Listening to Frontline Staff

David Marquez’s work talks about this, where he talks about the people at the top of the organization have all the authority but the people at the bottom have all the information. A lot of your frontline staff who are day-to-day with your clients, and it’s the people at the top who aren’t day-to-day with the clients but they’re making all the strategic decisions.

Building Trust in Diverse Organizations

Trust in a company is not that dissimilar from trust in our personal relationships and friendships. It’s a human experience, it’s a feeling. And as we’ve all experienced during covid, it’s more difficult to build trust virtually. It’s not impossible but it requires a lot more work and a lot more intention.

Creating Opportunities for Connection

You have to create those opportunities artificially, right prescriptively, you have to force it to happen. One easy thing to do we even we’ve embraced in our company is a Monday morning huddle where it’s encouraged that as many people show up as possible. It’s an opportunity for us to connect as human beings where we say, “this weekend was a hard weekend, you know my dad was admitted to the hospital” or “this weekend was a great weekend because I got to spend some time with the kids.”

Leveraging Technology for Connection

Encouraging people to have work sessions with each other where you turn on FaceTime or Zoom or something and although you’re not having a meeting you just have them there while you’re doing your work. Or having drinks together or using the telephone because you can connect even better over the telephone than sometimes over Zoom.

Importance of Purpose in Teaming

But if you take a group of people and put them in a team even if they get along and you have some decent leadership and there’s no sense of purpose or cause or just cause to give them to advance, then what it does is it creates it’s you can get myopic. So if you take a great team and you give them something to strive towards that’s when you’re going to get those really big wonderful ideas.

Lessons from Navy SEALs

Just across the bay you have Coronado, and in Coronado is the home of the Navy SEALs. I’ve had a chance to visit Coronado and visit with the Navy SEALs. I had the opportunity to work with and get to know the head of training for Dev group for SEAL Team Six.

Selection Criteria for Elite Teams

How do you choose who gets into this group? They’re all incredibly high performers. He drew a chart, an x-y axis, and on the vertical axis, he wrote the word for performance, and on the horizontal axis, he wrote the word trust. The way he defined it is performance is how good are you at your job, trust is what’s your character, what kind of person are you. He put it as, “I may trust you with my life, but do I trust you with my money or my wife?” So you might be great on the battlefield, you might have good aim, but do I trust you off the battlefield?

Balancing Performance and Trust

What he explained is that nobody wants the low performer of low trust, of course. Clearly, everybody wants the high performer of high trust. But what they learned is that the high performer of low trust is a toxic team member, and they would rather have a medium performer of high trust, sometimes even a low performer of high trust, on a relative scale over the high performer of low trust.

Importance of Measuring Trust

Most businesses have a million metrics to measure someone’s performance and negligible to no metrics to measure someone’s trustworthiness. If you can develop objective metrics that you can help companies implement, you will profoundly change the course of business because it’s not that companies aren’t interested in it, they just don’t know how to measure it.

Identifying High Trust Individuals

If you go to any team and ask them who the low performer of low trust is, they’ll point to the same person. Equally so, if you go to any team and you say who’s always got your back when the chips are down, they’ll also all point to the same person, who’s probably your most gifted natural leader who may not be your highest performing individual on the team.

Military’s Approach to Trust

The military is much better at measuring trust because for them, trust is life and death. If his Marines doubt for one second that their leader is being honest with them, or if his Marines think that he’s doing something just to advance his own career and protect himself with the sacrifices of his Marines, trust will break and people will die. Command and control only works when you have spent time building the trust up until that moment.

Importance of Trust in Extreme Situations

You will make mistakes, so the Marines know that mistakes will get made and people will die because of those mistakes, but we’re not doing them on purpose, and we’re not needlessly sacrificing people. They will follow those orders blindly. Now, that’s an extreme example because it’s the Marine Corps and it’s life and death, but the same is true in business. You can’t be in command and control all the time; that’s micromanagement and that wears people out. But good leaders who are empathetic and spend the time building trust and care about their people, in chaos, in crisis, they have the opportunity to convert into short-term command and control, and it’s highly effective.

Challenges of Building Trust

What gets in the way of good teaming? I don’t think it’s, you know, I think it’s the stuff that you’d expect. I mean, I think it’s egos and insecurities. We’re human beings, and I think we forget that business is a very human enterprise. I mean, it’s called a company for heaven’s sakes; it’s literally a collection of people. Passive aggression and, you know, I’ve seen this in other companies where everybody’s so nice, but there’s no healthy mechanism to release tension or have a fight or have a disagreement.

Lack of Leadership Training

One of the big challenges that modern business faces is that we want good leadership, but we don’t teach people how to lead. When someone’s junior in their career, we give them tons of training to be good at their job, but most companies are very bad at giving those people any training for their new job, which is called leadership. We have to make this conversion where we’re no longer responsible for the job; we’re now responsible for the people who perform the job.

Teaching Leadership Skills

We don’t teach active listening; we don’t teach how to give and receive feedback; we don’t teach empathy; we don’t teach how to have an effective confrontation; we don’t teach how to have a difficult conversation. There is a massive market opportunity to teach the skills of leadership to people who are becoming leaders because if we want good leaders, we have to teach them how to lead as a skill like any other.

Goal Setting and Performance Metrics

When you learn to embrace an infinite mindset, you start to see opportunities for the way that we run our businesses. Goal setting is great; people like ambition, we like difficult goals, but metrics need to be dials rather than absolutes. Most of our goals are arbitrary, and worse, we incentivize everybody to hit that number. There’s nothing wrong with goal setting, but I also believe in tracking what’s going on as you’re driving towards that.

Goal and Strategy

The goal, and if you’re breaking the thing as you’re going to hit the goal, okay, congratulations, you hit 200 stories, and you bonus everybody who’s responsible for that. But you end up with 200 broken stores. And when you think about the infinite game, if the goal is to stay in the game as long as possible, that’s not a good strategy. And so it’s okay, simply dial it back and do it right, right? And you’re more likely to stay in the game longer. So that’s one thing.

Trend Data Importance

The other thing is I think trend data is really important. We’ve over-indexed, and you and I were talking about this backstage. In the United States especially, but the rest of the world has kind of followed along, we over-indexed on rugged individualism. We over-indexed on short-termism. And we over-indexed on heroizing Jack Welch and GE, right? And if you look at some of the things that came out of the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, you know, the rise of shareholder Supremacy wasn’t really a thing prior to the late 70s, right? It was really popularized in the 80s and 90s.

The rise of incentivizing executives based on the price of inequity rather than the performance of the company wasn’t really a thing. Using mass layoffs to balance the books, just think about that for a second. I’m going to tell you that you no longer have a job. Go home and tell your family that you’ve lost your job not because you did anything wrong. It’s not a meritocracy. You’ve been a great employee for 20 years, but we missed our arbitrary projections. We’re still profitable, just not as profitable as we promised, so I need you to sacrifice so I can tell someone else we made our numbers. That philosophy, which is normal in business today, so normal that CEOs go on television and talk about, “Oh, we just announced layoffs to meet our numbers,” and everybody goes, you know, and the stock price goes up. Figure that one out. But when we announce increased spending on R&D, stock price goes down. Figure that one out.

But I digress. The point is, the point is, is that that did not exist in the United States prior to the 1980s. It actually didn’t exist. And these philosophies of business that are very, very short-termism and very, very finite-minded were popularized in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. And I think we’re seeing a shift now. We’re seeing a Young Generation that’s scratching their heads and saying, “Is that really what we want?” You know, companies complain about how their Young Generation, these young kids aren’t loyal and they state, you know, and they quit and they leave and they’re not lo—you know, this is—but think about how they grew up. They grew up watching their parents get laid off through no fault of their own. Why should they trust companies, right?

And so, and so I think we have a massive opportunity to reinvent the way in which business works and to push aside some of the things that, you know, Jack Welch built a company for the short term. GE is a shadow of its former self. Who knows if it’s even going to survive? It’ll get chopped up and sold off for spare parts, right? It wasn’t a company built to last, ironically. And I think there’s a massive opportunity and there’s a massive vacuum right now. There used to be a time where GE was the leadership Factory that if you had GE on your resume, you could go run any company you wanted and drill it into the ground. It happened, actually, yeah, it did happen. I mean, it was the leadership Factory. I mean, and the GE way and Jack Welch way was the standard. And since that’s gone out of favor because we realized it was good for the short term, not good for the long term, it’s what—it was proved to be and did a lot of damage to our economy along the way and a lot of damage to corporate cultures along the way. You know, the average lifespan of a company used to be 60 years. Now it’s 17.

There is a massive gaping hole that there is no leadership factory in America right now. There is no company that is the gold standard for what leadership should look like in a modern new economy. It’s not GE, that’s for sure. You know, tech companies steal from each other, but there’s no leadership Factory. So my challenge to you is, why not you? Like, why not? Why not PWC? Why not you? That you develop a style of leadership and a curriculum of leadership that you have a leadership program that’s simply having worked at PWC, literally when you apply for a new job somewhere else, like, literally just having PWC on your resume makes you the number one candidate to run another company. And imagine what happens when you create a leadership Factory that your best people, even your mediocre people, because they’re so much better than everybody else, go on to run the future of American Business, which is what happened in GE, which is why that model perpetuated. Imagine the impact that you can have in the future of business simply because you embrace it for yourself.

Start with Why

I didn’t see this one coming. I like it a lot. That’s what I’m talking about, yeah. I had to make up for accidentally sitting on your vision statement. It’s right there in front of you, laughs.

So the first book that you wrote, yeah, was “Start with Why,” right? So actually, a colleague in this room gave me the book, you know, many years ago. So why did you write a book, and what are some of the key takeaways from that book?

Simon Sinek: Start with why wasn’t supposed to be a book, and it wasn’t supposed to be a TED Talk. It was born out of my own pain, my own journey. I had what appeared to be a superficially good life. I was living the American dream. I started my own business, I had a little marketing consultancy, we did good work, we had great clients, well-liked, you know, things were fine. But I completely fell out of love with my own work.

And people gave me stupid advice, like, “Do what you love.” I’m like, I’m doing the same thing, and I don’t love it anymore, you know, follow your bliss, thank you. It’s perfectly true, it’s just not actionable. And so I was very embarrassed by the fact that I didn’t want to wake up and go to work anymore because superficially everything was okay. So I didn’t talk about it, and all of my energy went into pretending that I was happier, more successful, and more in control than I felt, and that is exhausting.

Importance of Empathy in Leadership

It’s the complete opposite. I think it’s a statement of absolute confidence and it makes you unbelievably beautiful and appealing to friends and colleagues alike because we know who you are and what you stand for. I think it’s wonderful. Thank you.

Colleague: So, you know, I’m actually blushing but you can tell.

Simon Sinek: But you’re radiating.

Colleague: So, what other questions have been asking you? What would you like to tell my colleagues? What’s in your mind coming out of COVID? Not completely out but, you know, right? The last two years have been difficult, yeah. Leadership styles have had to change, yeah, or evolved, yeah. The Millennials made decisions very differently than how they made decisions before, yeah. Why should we pay attention to?

I think that we’ve become so as a society, especially in business, we’ve become so obsessed with numbers that we forgot about people. And for me, there was a magic that happened when COVID showed up. It was, there was a little bit of real magic, which is when we first went into lockdown, which is almost two years to the day today, when we first went into lockdown, a lot of leaders, whether they were effective or ineffective prior to COVID, a lot of leaders just sort of leaned on their humanity. They picked up the phone and called their team one by one. They said, “Are you okay?” And they actually cared about the answer. And that’s called good leadership. You know, and it was an organic and human reaction to crisis. But I would have loved to have seen a, prior to COVID, and I hope that practice remains after COVID, you know, empathy is a magical thing. And I think we forget that we are human beings working with human beings. That’s all it is, whether they’re colleagues or clients. You know, it’s, it is a human enterprise. And empathy in the workplace, I’ll show you what it looks like because, and by the way, please stop saying soft skills. We talk about hard skills and so there’s nothing soft about them, number one, and number two, hard and soft are opposites. And I would hate to think that hard skills and soft skills are working against each other. It’s hard skills and human skills. And for somebody to truly perform, I’m going to teach you hard skills, which are the skills you need to do your job, and I’m going to teach you human skills, which are the skills you need to be a better human. And if you can master both of those, you will thrive at this organization. And I think that we need to double down on those human skills.

So, what does empathy look like in the workplace again? Nothing soft about it, incredibly human. So, the old system, prior, you know, a non-empathetic scenario, fairly normal. You walk into someone’s office and say, “Um, your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row. Um, we’ve had this conversation before. Um, if you don’t pick up your numbers in the fourth quarter, I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Right? That’s a fairly normal scenario. We don’t do that here. No, amongst your clients, yeah, that’s good. Um, better. Here’s what empathy looks like. Your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row. We’ve talked about this before. Are you okay? What’s going on? I’m worried about you. Right? And the injection of humanity in a human enterprise pays dividends. And this is the thing that’s I think so fascinating about leadership in general is we actually don’t know the things that we say or do that actually have an impact, positive or negative, I might add. You know, and they’re moments of truth. Like every single one of us has had an experience that we’ve done to someone or someone’s done to us that we thought, “Well, that was so innocuous,” we didn’t even realize that, for example, you know, somebody did that, somebody asked me how I was, how I was doing. They thought nothing of it, went about their day, and ten years later, we still carry that gratitude to that person and that loyalty. Um, and I think we forget, you know, just how important showing up and in our messy, imperfect human way, trying to be a version of our best selves amongst each other every single day. And by the way, all the talents and skills you teach at work about good leadership, the act of listening, the how to have difficult conversations, all these things, every single one of those will translate back home. You’ll see marriages, the quality of marriages improve, you’ll see the quality of relationships between parents and their children improved because of the skills that the office is teaching them how

Companies’ Focus on Culture and Leadership

Companies have not focused on culture and leadership for far too long, and you better fix that because this is kind of an environment of your making. It affects all ranks, not just junior ranks. I think it’s a great opportunity and, again, I think it’s an opportunity for your practice to help companies who are concerned about this to double down on culture. Give people a place that they want to go to work, that they feel seen, that they feel heard, that they feel like they have a voice, they feel like their work contributes to something bigger than themselves, that their energy is not just about helping somebody else make money, but rather they get to share in the joy and the spoils. I think it’s a huge, huge opportunity for your practice to teach companies how to do this. They’re used to solving business problems while ignoring cultural problems. Look at a lot of the unicorns, whether it’s Groupons, or Ubers, or GameStops—I mean, pick your unicorn. Almost every single one of them, the reason things got shaky had nothing to do with the business model, had everything to do with the leadership and the culture, and the fact that they were completely ill-prepared for anything going other than perfectly according to plan, which, as it turns out, you know, no plan ever goes according to plan. I think it’s a huge opportunity for you to actually change the face of how business works and react to what companies are struggling with. Thank you, thank you, great remark, Simon. Sign it, thank you, thank you very much, appreciate it. Thank you, thanks, great job, man, good job, thank you.