In his work with organizations around the world, Simon Sinek noticed that some teams trust each other so deeply that they would literally put their lives on the line for each other. Other teams, no matter what incentives are offered, are doomed to infighting, fragmentation and failure. The answer became clear during a conversation with a Marine Corps general. Sinek watched as the most junior Marines ate first while the most senior Marines took their place at the back of the line.
What's symbolic in the chow hall is deadly serious on the battlefield: Great leaders sacrifice their own comfort--even their own survival--for the good of those in their care. Too many workplaces are driven by cynicism, paranoia, and self- interest. But the best ones foster trust and cooperation because their leaders build what Sinek calls a "Circle of Safety" that separates the security inside the team from the challenges outside.
Culture, inspiration, and emotion--these are the three new imperatives of the intentional leader. The Intention Imperative explains how five very different businesses use clarity of purpose and consistent action to achieve extraordinary success in their given fields.
The larger points of intentional leadership, intentional leaders, and their place in the current world are explained, giving readers the opportunity to spot the parallels in real-world examples. But infinite games are more mysterious. Their object is not winning, but ensuring the continuation of play. The rules may change, the boundaries may change, even the participants may change—as long as the game is never allowed to come to an end. What are infinite games?
How do they affect the ways we play our finite games? What are we doing when we play—finitely or infinitely? And how can infinite games affect the ways in which we live our lives? Carse explores these questions with stunning elegance, teasing out of his distinctions a universe of observation and insight, noting where and why and how we play, finitely and infinitely. He surveys our world—from the finite games of the playing field and playing board to the infinite games found in culture and religion—leaving all we think we know illuminated and transformed.
Along the way, Carse finds new ways of understanding everything from how an actress portrays a role, to how we engage in sex, from the nature of evil, to the nature of science. Finite games, he shows, may offer wealth and status, power and glory. But infinite games offer something far more subtle and far grander. Carse has written a book rich in insight and aphorism. Already an international literary event, Finite and Infinite Games is certain to be argued about and celebrated for years to come.
Reading it is the first step in learning to play the infinite game. Start With Why has led millions of readers to rethink everything they do — in their personal lives, their careers and their organizations. I believe fulfillment is a right and not a privilege.
Achieving that fulfillment starts with understanding exactly WHY we do what we do. As Start With Why has spread around the world, countless readers have asked me the same question: How can I apply Start With Why to my career, team, company or nonprofit?
Whether you've just started your first job, are leading a team, or are CEO of your own company, the exercises in this book will help guide you on a path to long-term success and fulfillment, for both you and your colleagues.
Thank you for joining us as we work together to build a world in which more people start with WHY. Inspire on! They fix their parents' home, negotiate finances, eventually weather the back and forth of will they or won't they move into a nursing facility--finally they do. This should be a bulleted list of key points about the book and about your background.
You can also include any data points about the sales or marketing strategy ie - full page ad in WIRED planned and anything else that would be a likely sales point for the book that would be valuable to share.
This complete summary of the ideas from Simon Sinek's book 'Leaders Eat Last' states that true leadership is all about putting the lower employees first. Real leaders take care of team members and focus on their well-being.
According to Sinek, leaders can create a Circle of Safety around their team to make sure that they protect their team members when addressing problems and challenges at work.
This Circle of Safety includes seven factors, such as powerful forces, direction and leadership. By integrating this model into their company, leaders can ensure that their employees are happy and cared for, which in turn will lead to higher levels of productivity.
Initially pressed into service by the Vietcong, Le Ly was captured and imprisoned by government forces. As an organization grows, however, the leaders at the top must trust the layers of management to look out for those in their charge.
However, when those inside the bureaucracy work primarily to protect themselves, progress slows and the entire organization becomes more susceptible to external threats and pressures. Only when the Circle of Safety surrounds everyone in the organization, and not just a few people or a department or two, are the benefits fully realized.
Weak leaders are the ones who only extend the benefits of the Circle of Safety to their fellow senior executives and a chosen few others. And in so doing, silos form, politics entrench, mistakes are covered up instead of exposed, the spread of information slows and unease soon replaces any sense of cooperation and security.
Strong leaders, in contrast, extend the Circle of Safety to include every single person who works for the organization. Self-preservation is unnecessary and fiefdoms are less able to survive.
It is easy to know when we are in the Circle of Safety because we can feel it. We feel valued by our colleagues and we feel cared for by our superiors. We become absolutely confident that the leaders of the organization and all those with whom we work are there for us and will do what they can to help us succeed.
We become members of the group. We feel like we belong. When we believe that those inside our group, those inside the Circle, will look out for us, it creates an environment for the free exchange of information and effective communication.
This is fundamental to driving innovation, preventing problems from escalating and making organizations better equipped to defend themselves from the outside dangers and to seize the opportunities.
Absent a Circle of Safety, paranoia, cynicism and self-interest prevail. The whole purpose of maintaining the Circle of Safety is so that we can invest all our time and energy to guard against the dangers outside. Not only does feeling safe inside give us peace of mind, but the positive impact on the organization itself is remarkable. When the Circle is strong and that feeling of belonging is ubiquitous, collaboration, trust and innovation result. This is an important point.
We cannot tell people to trust us. We cannot instruct people to come up with big ideas. These are always results— the results of feeling safe and trusted among the people with whom we work. When the Circle of Safety is strong, we naturally share ideas, share intelligence and share the burdens of stress. Leaders want to feel safe too. No matter what place we occupy in the pecking order, every single one of us wants to feel like we are valued by the others in the group. Ken is a midranking executive who works in operations for a large multinational bank.
He makes a good living, though he is not as rich as some of the analysts and traders at the company. He lives in a lovely home in the suburbs with his wife and two kids. From the outside looking in, he should be happy. Ken likes the idea of quitting to do something else, but with kids and a mortgage to pay, that day may have passed.
Right now, he needs to be a responsible husband and father. What an amazing thought to love our jobs. To feel safe at work. To work for a company that actually cares how we feel about ourselves and the work we do. The number of leaders of companies who work hard to make their employees feel safe when they come in is, sadly, fewer than most of us would like to admit. Work is, well, work. We have bills to pay.
We have kids to feed. College educations to fund. There is just too much on our plates. And the world out there, the great unknown, is a dangerous place.
So we stay put. Equally so, the idea of running a company in which nearly everyone feels safe and works to take care of each other sounds great. Most leaders intellectually understand the importance and value of putting the well-being of people first.
It is the subject of books and many articles in the Harvard Business Review. We all write about this stuff like no one knows it. But the reality of running a business, big or small, private or public, makes it nearly impossible to do the things folks like me write about.
The pressures from Wall Street, corporate boards and the threats from our competition are intense. And for a small business, just finding enough clients to help keep the doors open is hard enough. And understandably so. The threats from the outside are just too great to worry about how people feel inside.
And without those companies it is going to be harder for us to find a job in a company that truly does care about our well-being. So, we tell ourselves, what we have will have to do. What would be the point of rocking the boat or taking unnecessary risk? The risk is just too high that we may land somewhere worse or get more of the same.
So why change? But there is always a cost for the decisions we make. Our ability to provide for our kids, make ends meet or live a certain lifestyle sometimes comes at the cost of our own joy, happiness and fulfillment at work.
We convince ourselves that the outside, the unknown, is always dangerous which it is. At least inside there is a hope of feeling secure. A hope. But there is more to that reality than most of us know about.
The price we pay for a perception of stability comes at its own cost. And that cost is far greater than happiness. Of life and death.
First, that sense of safety we may have now is, for many of us, a lie we tell ourselves. If it were a true meritocracy, we could tell ourselves that if we work hard and do well, our jobs will be safe.
But this is hardly the case. Although that may be true some of the time, it is not something we can bank on. And sometimes the cost to keep us employed simply falls on the wrong side of the equation. And at many companies, that equation is reevaluated annually, which means every year we are at risk. But the myth of job stability may be the least of our concerns.
A study conducted by a team of social scientists at the University of Canberra in Australia concluded that having a job we hate is as bad for our health and sometimes worse than not having a job at all.
Levels of depression and anxiety among people who are unhappy at work were the same or greater than those who were unemployed. Stress and anxiety at work have less to do with the work we do and more to do with weak management and leadership.
When we know that there are people at work who care about how we feel, our stress levels decrease. But when we feel like someone is looking out for themselves or that the leaders of the company care more about the numbers than they do us, our stress and anxiety go up.
This is why we are willing to change jobs in the first place; we feel no loyalty to a company whose leaders offer us no sense of belonging or reason to stay beyond money and benefits. Misery may love company, but it is the companies that love misery that suffer the most. If our bosses criticize us on a regular basis, 22 percent of us actively disengage. I would like to say that misery loves company, but in this case, it is the companies that love misery that suffer the most.
We are hardly surprised when one of them suddenly drops dead of a heart attack before hitting fifty. It is not the demands of the job that cause the most stress, but the degree of control workers feel they have throughout their day. The studies also found that the effort required by a job is not in itself stressful, but rather the imbalance between the effort we give and the reward we feel.
Put simply: less control, more stress. The Whitehall Studies are seminal because the scientists studied government employees who have equal health benefits.
This meant they were able to control for variances in healthcare standards, which may not be the case if they were to have studied a large public company in the U. Though even U.
Leaders, the study showed, have overall lower stress levels than those who work for them. The findings of the Whitehall Studies are even more dramatic when you consider the connection between job stress and health. In other words, those seemingly strung-out top executives were, in fact, living longer, healthier lives than the clerks and managers working for them. And the discrepancy is not a small one. Workers lowest in the hierarchy had an early death rate four times that of those at the top.
Jobs that gave workers less control were linked to higher rates of mental illness as well. But this is not about our place in the hierarchy per se. More important, the hierarchy is not the solution. Simply earning more money or working our way up the ladder is not a prescription for stress reduction. The study was about our sense of control over our work and, indeed, our lives. What this means is that the converse is also true.
Those only doing as they are told, always forced to follow the rules, are the ones who suffer the most. Our feelings of control, stress, and our ability to perform at our best are all directly tied to how safe we feel in our organizations.
Feeling unsafe around those we expect to feel safe—those in our tribes work is the modern version of the tribe —fundamentally violates the laws of nature and how we were designed to live. The Whitehall Studies are not new, and their findings have been confirmed over and over.
Yet even with the preponderance of data we still do nothing. Even when we know that feeling insecure at work hurts our performance and our health, sometimes even killing us, we stay in jobs we hate.
For some reason, we are able to convince ourselves that unknown dangers outside are more perilous than the dangers inside. And so we adapt and put up with uncomfortable work environments that do not make us feel good or inspire our best work. We have all, at some time, rationalized our position or our place and continued doing exactly what we were doing.
Human resources consultancy Mercer LLC reported that between fourth quarter and first quarter , one in three employees seriously considered leaving their jobs, up 23 percent from five years prior.
The problem was that less than 1. This is one of the issues with a bad working environment. One, it says that an uncomfortably high number of people would rather be working somewhere else, and two, that they see no other option to improve how they feel about their jobs beyond quitting. There is an alternative route, however.
It requires that we stay. We will still need to change the way we do things when we show up at work. It will require us to turn some of our focus away from ourselves to give more attention to those to the left of us and those to the right of us. Like the Spartans, we will have to learn that our strength will come not from the sharpness of our spears but from our willingness to offer others the protection of our shields. Some say a weak job market or bad economy is the reason to stick it out, in which case leaders of companies should want to treat their people better during hard times to prevent a mass exodus as soon as things improve.
And in a good economy, leaders of companies should also want to treat their people well so that their people will stop at nothing to help the company manage when the hard times return which, inevitably, they will. The best companies almost always make it through hard times because the people rally to make sure they do.
In other words, from a strictly business standpoint, treating people well in any economy is more cost effective than not. Children are better off having a parent who works into the night in a job they love than a parent who works shorter hours but comes home unhappy.
This is the influence our jobs have on our families. Working late does not negatively affect our children, but rather, how we feel at work does. Parents may feel guilty, and their children may miss them, but late nights at the office or frequent business trips are not likely the problem.
So what is the price we pay for not demanding that our leaders concern themselves with our well-being? We are not, as we think, putting up with miserable so that we may provide for our children. By putting up with miserable, we may be doing them harm. There is only one way we can solve this problem. By building and maintaining Circles of Safety where we work.
Pointing fingers is not the solution, pulling together and doing something is. And the good news is, there are powerful forces that can help us. If we can learn to harness these seemingly supernatural forces, we can put right what is so wrong. This is no soapbox rambling. It is just biology. It was about the worst place anyone would want to live. It was incredibly dangerous. There were no supermarkets of any sort; the residents were left to forage or hunt for any food they could find.
Survival, under these conditions, was something people really had to think about. Every moment of every day, there could always be something out there that could do them harm. There were no classrooms, and there were no hospitals. As things stood, there were no jobs to be had. And for good reason, there were no companies. This is not some post-apocalyptic Mad Max scenario. The time is fifty thousand years ago and modern man, Homo sapiens, is taking his first steps out in the world.
This is where we come from. Our ancestors were born dirt poor. Any opportunities came from their will and hard work to create them. And create them they did. Our species was built to manage in conditions of great danger and insufficient resources. Life in Paleolithic times was not like the aftermath of a hurricane.
Our ancestors were not the stereotypical cavemen we like to imagine. They looked like we do today and were just as smart and capable as we are today.
Other than that, they were just like you and me. Nearly everything about humans is designed to help us survive and perpetuate the species through tough times—very tough times. Our physiology and our need to cooperate both exist with our survival in mind. We are at our best when we face danger together. Unfortunately, there are too many leaders of companies who believe, in the face of external challenges, that the best way to motivate their people is by creating a sense of internal urgency or pressure.
Based on our biology and anthropology, however, nothing could be further from the truth. When we feel like we belong to the group and trust the people with whom we work, we naturally cooperate to face outside challenges and threats. When we do not have a sense of belonging, however, then we are forced to invest time and energy to protect ourselves from each other.
And in so doing, we inadvertently make ourselves more vulnerable to the outside threats and challenges. Plus, with our attention facing inward, we will also miss outside opportunities. When we feel safe among the people with whom we work, the more likely we are to survive and thrive. In the Beginning. Part of our advantage is thanks to the neocortex—our complex, problem-solving brain. It also gives us the ability for sophisticated communication. But another critical reason we survived was thanks to our remarkable ability to cooperate.
We are a highly social species whose survival and ability to prosper depend on the help of others. Our ability to work together, to help and protect each other, worked so well, in fact, that our populations did more than survive, they thrived. Elephants survived also, but the life of an elephant today is largely the same as it was millions of years ago. But not us. Our lives are completely different than they were fifty thousand years ago. Though our species was molded to suit our environment, we were so good at working together and solving problems that we found ways to mold our environments to suit us.
The better we did, the better we got at changing our conditions to suit our needs instead of being changed to suit the conditions. The problem is, our basic genetic coding remains the same. We are an old-fashioned bunch living in a modern, resource-rich world. This has its obvious advantages but, like everything, comes at a cost. The men went out and hunted together and the whole community worked together to raise the young, care for the sick and the elderly and look out for each other.
There was conflict, of course, just like there is conflict in any group. But when push came to shove, they put all their differences aside and worked together. Just as we may have serious issues with one of our siblings, if someone else threatens them, we will rise up to defend them. We always protect our own.
This is one of the reasons that treason is punishable in the same way as murder. Given its importance to our ability to survive, we humans take this trust thing really seriously. Our success proves it. Cooperation and mutual aid work better than competition and rugged individualism. Why add another degree of difficulty by fighting against each other when we were already forced to struggle against the hardships of nature, limited resources or other outside threats? This cooperative village life existed from the Amazonian rain forests to the open plains of Africa.
In other words, it was not the physical environment that determined our best chance for survival and success—it was the very biology of our species, the design of the human being itself. The manner in which we evolved—to help each other—worked regardless of where we came from or the unique hardships we may have encountered.
Every single human on the planet, regardless of culture, is naturally inclined to cooperate. We are social animals, and being social was as important to us thousands of years ago as it is today. It was a significant way we built and maintained trust and the way we got to know each other. Equally as important are conferences, company picnics and the time we spend around the watercooler. The more familiar we are with each other, the stronger our bonds. Social interaction is also important for the leaders of an organization.
Roaming the halls of the office and engaging with people beyond meetings really matters. Perhaps the closest example of a modern system that mimics our ancestral kinship societies is the college dorm. Though students may have their own rooms which are usually shared , doors are often left open as students socialize between the rooms.
The hallway becomes the center of social life and rooms are for homework and sleeping and sometimes not even that. The bonds of friendship that form in those dorms are vital. Our success as a species was not luck—it was earned. We worked hard to get to where we are today and we did it together. We are, at a deeply ingrained and biological level, social machines. And when we work to help each other, our bodies reward us for our effort so that we will continue to do it.
Our Chemical Dependency trial and error of evolution, almost every detail about our physiology is there for a reason. Our taste buds tell our digestive systems which enzymes to release to best deal with the food that is on its way down, just like our sense of smell helps us detect if food is spoiled or not.
Similarly our eyebrows were designed to help channel sweat away from our eyes when we were running toward prey—or running away to avoid becoming prey. Everything about our bodies was designed with one goal—to help us survive. This includes the feelings of happiness. Just as any parent, teacher or manager knows, if they offer the promise of bounty, like candy, gold stars or performance bonuses—or the threat of punishment—they can get the behavior they want.
They know we will focus our attention on tasks that produce the results that earn us rewards. We know that we earn our bonuses only when we get the results they want. And for the most part, it works. It works really well, in fact. Mother Nature figured out a lot earlier than our bosses, however, to use an incentive system to condition us to do certain things to achieve desired results.
In the case of our biology, our bodies employ a system of positive and negative feelings—happiness, pride, joy or anxiety, for example—to promote behaviors that will enhance our ability to get things done and to cooperate. Whereas our bosses might reward us with an end-of-year bonus, our bodies reward us for working to keep ourselves and those around us alive and looked after with chemicals that make us feel good.
And now, after thousands of years, we are all completely and utterly chemical-dependent. Whether acting alone or in concert, in small doses or large, anytime we feel any sense of happiness or joy, odds are it is because one or more of these chemicals is coursing through our veins. They each serve a very real and practical purpose: our survival. The Paradox of Being Human as individuals and as members of groups at all times. I am one and I am one of many.
This also creates some inherent conflicts of interest. When we make decisions, we must weigh the benefits to us personally against the benefits to our tribe or collective.
Working exclusively to advance ourselves may hurt the group, while working exclusively to advance the group may come at a cost to us as individuals. This tension often weighs on our consciences when we make decisions.
I appreciate the irony that we even debate, as individuals and as groups, which one is primary. The fact is, both are true. Even in our own biology, there exists this seeming conflict of interest.
Of the four primary chemical incentives in our bodies, two evolved primarily to help us find food and get things done while the other two are there to help us socialize and cooperate. The first two chemicals, endorphins and dopamine, work to get us where we need to go as individuals—to persevere, find food, build shelters, invent tools, drive forward and get things done.
The other two, serotonin and oxytocin, are there to incentivize us to work together and develop feelings of trust and loyalty. They work to help strengthen our social bonds so that we are more likely to work together and to cooperate, so that we can ultimately survive and ensure our progeny will live on beyond us.
We buy too much because everything we see we want to eat now. Our ancestors of the Paleolithic era lived in times when resources were either scarce or hard to come by. Imagine if every time we felt hungry, we had to go hunting for a few hours. Odds are our species would not have survived very well with a system like that. And so our bodies, in an effort to get us to repeat behaviors that are in our best interest, came up with a way to encourage us to go hunting and gathering on a regular basis instead of waiting until we were starving.
Two chemicals—endorphins and dopamine—are the reason that we are driven to hunt, gather and achieve. These are the chemicals of progress. Often released in response to stress or fear, they mask physical pain with pleasure. This is one of the reasons runners and other endurance athletes continue to push their bodies harder and harder. It is not simply because they have the discipline to do so; they do it because it actually feels good.
They love and sometimes crave the amazing high they can achieve from a hard workout. The biological reason for endorphins, however, has nothing to do with exercise.
It has to do with survival. The caveman application of the chemical feel-good is far more practical. Because of endorphins, humans have a remarkable capacity for physical endurance. Imagine a world where almost everyone wakes up inspired to go to work, feels trusted and valued during the day, then returns home feeling fulfilled. This is not a crazy, idealized notion. Today, in many successful organizations, great leaders create environments in which people naturally work together to do remarkable things.
In his work with organizations around the world, Simon Sinek noticed that some teams trust each other so deeply that they would literally put their lives on the line for each other. Other teams, no matter what incentives are offered, are doomed to infighting, fragmentation and failure. The answer became clear during a conversation with a Marine Corps general. Sinek watched as the most junior Marines ate first while the most senior Marines took their place at the back of the line.
What's symbolic in the chow hall is deadly serious on the battlefield: Great leaders sacrifice their own comfort--even their own survival--for the good of those in their care. Too many workplaces are driven by cynicism, paranoia, and self-interest. But the best ones foster trust and cooperation because their leaders build what Sinek calls a "Circle of Safety" that separates the security inside the team from the challenges outside.
Sinek illustrates his ideas with fascinating true stories that range from the military to big business, from government to investment banking.
0コメント