Simon Sinek

02/18/19 • 33 min

In this week's A Call to Lead I talk with Simon Sinek. You may know Simon from his TED Talks, which are viral phenoms, or his best-selling books. Start With Why, his first book, is a guide to discovering and honing purpose to help build extraordinary teams. In his upcoming and fifth book, The Infinite Game, Simon explains how to lead in a world where the competition comes and goes, where rules are changeable, and where there is neither a finish line nor definite winners. Simon spoke about playing "the infinite game" as part of a keynote I gave kicking off the year for SAP last month, and in this podcast he talks about that and much more. Here are our team's five takeaways from the episode of A Call to Lead with Simon:

17:39 - To play the infinite game is really hard. Among all the important leadership traits, courage is No. 1. To do the right thing in the face of pressure is hard.

17:39 - Empathy is another critical leadership trait. Our common humanity matters. Whether they're customers or vendors or employees, we're dealing with human beings.

20:55 - Annual evaluations are a thing of the past, and it's not so much what the evaluation says, it's what the trend lines say. If you had a bad evaluation first and second quarter, but third and fourth quarter start to show signs of looking up, that's a good person. You’ll want to give that person a shot to keep improving.

24:10 - It's the responsibility of businesses to provide their people and their customers and their vendors a sense of purpose and a cause that we're all advancing - something that’s bigger than ourselves, and that's why all of life’s blood, sweat, and tears are worth it.

24:48 - Metrics are very important. Metrics help us measure speed and distance. But they don't indicate the end of the game.

17:39 - To play the infinite game is really hard. Among all the important leadership traits, courage is No. 1. To do the right thing in the face of pressure is hard.

17:39 - Empathy is another critical leadership trait. Our common humanity matters. Whether they're customers or vendors or employees, we're dealing with human beings.

24:48 - Metrics are very important. Metrics help us measure speed and distance. But they don't indicate the end of the game.

Previous Episode

Frances Frei

This week on A Call To Lead, I talk with one of my favorite leadership philosophers, Frances Frei. Frances is a TED Talk phenomenon, a professor at Harvard Business School, and a former executive at Uber. She's a fount of wisdom on developing great teams, maximizing your own performance, and building trust in a world that’s devoid of it. Here are just a few choice insights that Frances shared with me:

15:52 - Learn more than you have to so you can describe topics simply, especially if you’re the one tasked with ensuring people understand something difficult. Simplicity is a gift.

17:41 - Want to understand why so many bad things are happening in our world right now? We need to find a way to trust each other again. Most of our challenges stem from a lack of trust.

23:15 - If companies want to compete against the world's best, they need to look at hiring from a much wider pool of talent. It's the diversity that will unleash our excellence. Until recently, everyone has been fishing in a very narrow pond.

35:00 - Don’t deny your ego. Find out what it needs, be upfront and explicit about those needs, and work with your team to make sure you get what you need. Everyone has an ego that needs to be nourished.

38:07 - Millennials have an incredible threshold for what they will endure. They’re similar to one another, but very different from past generations...and they’re exactly what we need right now. And their time for leadership is not in the distant future, it’s here now.

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Don’t forget to check out Frances’ TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVeq-0dIqpk

Next Episode

Walter Isaacson

Today we're bringing you a A Call to Lead Classic—one of my favorite interviews that I've done at Call to Lead at SAP's annual Sapphire Now conference. My guest is Walter Isaacson. Talking with Walter is always head-spinning and enlightening because he is the foremost expert on leaders who also happen to be the world's smartest people. Walter's specialty is geniuses. He's written biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci. He's also a very smart leader himself, having headed CNN, TIME Magazine, and the Aspen Institute. Here are 5 things that Walter said and my team and I found interesting and relatable to all of us as ever-improving leaders:

5:43 - "If you're going to be a disruptor, you have to do like Steve Jobs and occasionally let your reach exceed your grasp."

19:07 - "Making a great product innovation is hard, but what's really hard and important is making the right team who can continue to do innovation." (Steve Jobs, when he was dying, said this to Walter Isaacson.)

25:03 - "The most important talent you need is the ability to see patterns."

25:03 - "If I were talking to somebody coming into a company now, I'd say what are your passions? And I'd hope there'd be three or four or five diverse passions. And then I would say, 'What is the pattern that you've seen by being interested in so many different things?'"

26:49 "Whatever business you're in, you've got to say I'm not in the business of moving lettuce or moving packages or flying metal, [but rather] I'm in the business of applying technology to customer needs."