Business is an INFINITE GAME | Full Speech

Please welcome back Mohammed Khande and welcome Simon Sinek.

All right, Simon Sinek.

This is going to be fun. As I told you yesterday, I have no idea what is going to go.

But you know, your team told me that I had to say something controversial. No.

You don't.

So, hey, Simon, many in this room know who you are, right? You're quite famous. But let me actually do a brief intro of Simon. So, Simon, you have studied how the greatest leaders are currently running the 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.

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. You can ask questions to the PwC Live app. Okay? So we are going to just have a conversation with Simon, but any question you might have, I'll try 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 order a free copy of that book to the PwC Live app. So everybody here will have the benefit of having this 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. 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, like John PwC, 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 Infinite Game. I know you wrote that book. I watched a few videos also about the Infinite Game. But tell us, what do you mean by this Infinite game?

In the mid-1980s, a philosopher and theologian by the name of Dr. James Karst 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's 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, 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.

Uh oh, we said that too. Yeah.

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, 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.

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 simultaneously trying to beat their competition and win and be the best. Those two are incongruent, right?

I'll give you an example, a silly example. When Circuit City went bankrupt, Best Buy didn't win anything, right? It didn't win anything. 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, when you play with an infinite mindset. You play not to beat anyone, but ultimately you play.

The only true competitor is yourself, which is, how do we make our products better this year than they were last year? How do we make our services better this year than they were 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.

Well, you mentioned five attributes, right, of creating that infinite mindset. Because I'm sure that is something that we have to practice. What are the five attributes? So.

To convert to an infinite mindset or embrace an infinite mindset, as you said, there are five practices. Number one is you have to advance a just cause. The second one is build trusting teams. The third is study your worthy rivals. Your fourth is have a capacity for existential flexibility. And the final one is to.

Have.

The courage to lead. So really quickly. 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 down the slides. You know.

It'S very nice being here.

Thank you very much.

And it's not wrong. It's just not useful. Like, nobody, Nobody.

Oh, man.

No, I mean, like. I mean, 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 going to advance the mission, right?

He said that yesterday.

So when I talk about advancing a just cause, right, A just cause is something a lot more idealistic. It's a statement of the world that you wish the way the world you wished it worked. It's the world that you imagine. Like, we imagine a world as PwC, we. 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 cause. So I'll give you an example. So my just cause, our organization's 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 and it 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. 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 its own way, but you can see a nation striving. 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. In reality, but you can see a nation striving.

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 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.

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, somebody.

Make innovate so we're better. 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. So it's not that those things are wrong. It's that what I'm, what I'm offering are.

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. So that was the first one.

Just cause, just cause. Advancing adjustment. You'll never achieve it. It's a idealized state. And even when you hear me say it, when you hear people say it, 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.

Then I talk about building trusting teams, which is essential because especially when you're operating at scale 300,000 people, trust is absolutely essential. Senior leadership has to trust middle management. That has to trust the front line 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 you were business?

Yeah, it's a lovely hotel.

Just asking.

What's that?

It was for business, right?

It was for business, yes. Just asking, was it a real business trip?

And.

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, do you like your job? And without skipping a beat, Noah said, I love my job. Now, in my line of work, that's significant. Like is rational. I like the people, 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.

It's 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 walk past us and catch us when we do something wrong there. 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 wring them out to see how much you can get out of them. You know, it's.

That's a good one, man.

It's a flawed question. The question is, how do we create an environment 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? It means that we feel psychologically safe enough to raise our hand and say, 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 you could be humiliated. And so when we work on teams where leadership is creating an environment where trust is 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 when you talk about reinvention and you talk about 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 vast or significant improvement. So 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, 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 then 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 absolutely. Is absolutely core to that. I find the worthy rival 1. Studying your worthy rivals 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 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. But unlike in football or baseball, in an infinite game, you can have two companies that offer relatively the same set of services for relatively the same price, relatively the same quality, a plus and minus here and there. And both can do profoundly well, make tons of money at the exact same time. In other words, there's no winning or losing. And so this is why we talk about being the best. Based on what?

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 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 or angry. It's probably because they're doing something better. Is their leadership better? Is their sales team better? 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 because they've screwed up their own business for whatever reason. Too much finite mindset, I guess.

You know, we had a conversation yesterday with everybody around who our competitors are today and about not fearing our competitors, right? Because to your point, be grateful for them. Yeah, be grateful for them, sure, let's not fear them. But also understanding that whoever we assume we are competing against today might not be who we 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 funny thing is the competitors that you select, it's an arbitrary list, right? Because none of the big competitors are the companies that take you down. Like MySpace didn't even know Facebook existed. You know, 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 to 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. 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 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 national video rental chain in the country, right? Huge company.

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.

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 to know the 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 experiment because another company had already proved that it had validity.

It was working.

That's the folly. The folly was there was no risk. They were just short term finite thinkers that were thinking about the. All they could think about was losing that 12%.

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? 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 a business's ability to make profound 180 degree strategic shift in order to advance that just cause.

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 as the perfect technology to do that.

And Jobs and Apple had, was already a big company ready, fast growing company, one of the first unicorns. They'd already had success on 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 to his senior executives who were with him, we're going to invest in this graphic user interface thing. And one of them, let's call him the voice of reason.

Said Steve, we can't, we cannot invest in this. We've already invested millions of dollars and countless man hours in a completely different strategic direction. If we take that money away and reinvest it in this graphic user interface thing, we're going to blow up our own business. To which Jobs actually said, better we should blow it up than someone else. And that decision led to the Macintosh. 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. And 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. And you know, the funny thing was with COVID a lot of companies were forced to do it. In most, in most careers, you'll do it once, two at the absolute most. But most, 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, which is 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 and you don't have the trusting teams, you'll probably break the company.

Wow. I'm thinking at this time what this will mean for us, but I don't know.

But now this is good thinking, by the way, because listen, none of us have the answers here about what the future is going to be. Of course, pivot what it might be for us in the future. That's thing that we need to think about.

Well, I mean, so there are some clues.

David Marquet'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. You know, it's 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. And so it's not about necessarily pushing all the information up, but sometimes it's about pushing authority down. However, there's another component to that which is when you have your brainstormings, are you actually asking your team what they're seeing? Are you bringing in junior people? And if you go to your middle managers and you say, who are your hotshots? You know, who's the 25 year old, 27 year old who's just like blowing, like, just blowing everybody's mind smart like you, they know who they are, grab them, borrow them, bring them in and say, tell me what you're thinking, tell me what you're seeing. Now, it doesn't mean you do what they say, but you're going to get information and you're going to get a quality of idea that for good reasons and bad reasons that have that the senior folks just don't have that perspective. They don't have the perspective of front line. They haven't been there in A long time. And they also don't have the perspective of youth and new technology. So reinvention all the ideas on what you could do and what you could become exist in your business. The question is, are you inviting the people to contribute some of those ideas?

Great point. Great point. Let's pivot to the concept of trust that you mentioned. Yeah, I mentioned to you, we are a very diverse team. Many of us in this room are new colleagues. We are just getting to work together. We haven't done it in a lot because it's a new organization that we built together. We are growing very fast. We have newcomers coming from competitors. Okay.

Other players.

Yes, other players. I learned something today. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Other players. So what are you seeing out there about some of the best practices around building trust in organizations that are so diverse and so fast growing? Like one of.

So trust in a company is not that dissimilar from trust in our personal relationships and friendships. You know, 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. You know, Isaac Stern, the famous violinist, said, music is what happens between the notes. Well, trust is what happens between the meetings.

Right? It.

It's the conversation walking into the meeting and the conversation walking out of the meeting. It's the bumping into somebody in the hallway and being like, oh, I meant to tell you. It's the, hey, you want to grab a coffee? That over the course of time, those little moments of truth, those little innocuous experiences that by themselves count from zero, but over time, they start to build relationship, and they start to build trust. The hard thing in a virtual environment is those things are gone. You don't have between the meetings. You. You only have the meeting.

The meeting.

And so what you have to do is create those opportunities artificially. Right. Prescriptively, you have to force it to happen. So one easy thing to do that we've embraced in our company is a Monday morning huddle where.

It'S encouraged that as many people show up as possible. Of course, if you have client stuff, you go do that. But as many people on an operating team come together and just check in with each other, and it's not about work. There's zero discussion of work. It's what's on your heart and mind. And then we answer a funny or provocative question that whoever's leading huddle that month will pose to the team. And it's an opportunity for us to connect as human beings. Where we say, this weekend was a hard weekend, my dad was admitted to hospital, or this weekend was a great weekend because I got to spend some time with the kids. I didn't even know you had kids. And we get to see each other as human beings and it goes a long way. It seems small and silly, but over the course of time we start to learn about each other and see each other as people rather than just as co workers or 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 I'm a huge fan of using the telephone because I actually think you can connect even better over the telephone than sometimes over Zoom. And like, if you have an issue, instead of sending an email, pick up the phone and call somebody because very often you'll solve the problem quicker. And it's not 55 backwards and forwards, but you'll probably learn something new. And you can hear a tone of voice which is all goes to building relationships. So.

We already know how to do it. It's just a matter of doing it. And in the real world. And you talk about diverse teams and new teams, you know, it's great. Leaders have the patience to sort of have a little empathy. Ask somebody how are you, learn something about them, where are you from? How do you find yourself here? What's your career path? It's human stuff. It's human stuff. It's just doing it at work.

Thank you. That's really good. So, you know, we talk about trust.

Let's talk about teaming, building high performance teams. Okay. What are you seeing out there about some of the best practices around teaming and collaboration? We are an organization that the only shot we have in the market if we all work together.

Right.

Because as individuals, when we look at many of the other players, they also have good people.

Yeah.

Secret sauce.

You hired some of them?

Yes, we hired some of them. Yes, we did.

There's good people everywhere. I mean, that's the reality. Right, Right.

But then our secret sauce, we believe, is teaming and collaboration because it gives us the ability to solve problems in a way that is unique and differentiated, to get to outcomes, to get to solutions that are much better.

Yeah, I think that's partially true. And.

No, no, no, no, no. Okay. No, no, you're absolutely right.

My bubble. Just like poof.

No no, no, I didn't say it was wrong. It's what I think that's partially true. Which is teams are essential. Trust is essential. The teaming, the ability to come to solutions is essential. 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. You can get myopic. And 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. So I think you're 100% right, which is you got to have those teams. They're essential. But then give that team.

Make them feel that their work is. Is worth more than the money you make from it. Right. That it's having impact in the world or in your clients, businesses. That is that when we look back at our careers and say, that was a life worth living, you know, So I think it is definitely part of it. And we're in San Diego, and just across the bay you have Coronado. And Coronado is the home of the Navy seals. I've had a chance to visit Coronado and visit with the Navy SEALs, and I had the opportunity. Within the SEALs, there is a more elite group. They have video games named after them. They have the number six in their name, which is technically a secret, so we can't talk about it. But the development group, but SEAL Team six. Yep.

Dev group.

The dev group is.

An elite team within the SEALs. I had the opportunity to work with and get to know the head of training for Dev Group for Seal Team 6. And I asked him, how do you choose who gets into this group? I mean, they're all incredibly high performers. And he drew a chart, an XY axis, and on the vertical axis he wrote the word for performance. And on the horizontal axis he wrote the word trust. And 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? And the way he put it is, I may trust you with my life, but do I trust you with my money or my wife? Right. They're seals.

And what do you explain to me?

Save that one again.

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 like, do I trust you off the battlefield? And so that's that. You May trust somebody to do good work with a client, but do you want to spend six hours with them stranded at an airport waiting for a flight? Yeah, it's a different. It's a different.

That's what I understand. Yeah. Good.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, I'll translate.

Talk about money. Why?

Right. So.

As he explained it to me, clearly nobody wants this person, the low performer of low trust. Of course, clearly everybody wants this person, the high performer of high trust. Of course, what they learned is that this person over here, 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. It's a relative scale over the high performer of low trust. And if you think about most businesses, we have a million metrics to measure someone's performance and we have negligible to no metrics to measure someone's trustworthiness. And I think this is a huge opportunity for you as a business, quite frankly, which is if you can develop objective metrics that you can help companies implement, you will profoundly change the course of business. Right, because it's not that companies aren't interested in it, they just don't know how to measure it. There is an irony which is actually very easy to identify.

These high performers of low trust. If you just go to any team and ask them who the asshole is, they'll all point to the same person.

And by the way, equally so. If you go to any team and you say who's always got your back when the chips are down, you know, they're always there for you. 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.

May not be a high performing individual on the team, but they get more out of the rest of the team.

That's interesting. I don't think that there is any metrics that we know about.

No, there's not very good. I mean, they exist, but they're not very good. And they're not easily comparable or objectified. And the military knows how to do this. I mean, the military is actually much better at measuring trust because for them it's trust is life and death.

Right?

That if you don't. And I've had so many experiences getting to work with Marines or SEALs or whoever where the way they talk about trust. I'll give you another example just to. So I had the opportunity to visit Quantico, which is where the Marine Corps selects its officers, and I had a briefing by the colonel in charge of OCS Officer Candidate School. And he showed up late for the briefing. Now, Marines don't show up late. You know, if you're on time, you're late. That's their belief. And he showed up late. He said, I'm terribly sorry. We've had an incident on base that we're considering throwing out one of our students, ending their career, throwing them out of the Marine Corps. And of course, Curious George here is like, what happened? You know? And he said to me, he fell asleep on watch. And I said, that's it. Like, he fell asleep on watch in the woods of Virginia and you're going to throw him out of the Marine Corps? And he, I like, you guys are pretty tough. He said, no, you don't understand. He said, when we asked him about it, he denied it. When we asked him about it again, he denied it again. And when we gave him irrefutable proof, then he said, I want to take responsibility for my actions. And the problem we have is you take responsibility for your actions at the time you perform your actions, not at the time you get caught. He said, we had another Marine who fell asleep on watch. He owned up to it immediately. We punished him, and we have no problem with him. And then the colonel went on to explain to me, he says, you have to understand if. If I take this person and I put them in a leadership position, and 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 at the sacrifices of his Marines, trust will break and people will die. And so when in a combat situation, when there is chaos, and by the way, command and control is not. Is not a leadership.

Mentality or philosophy that you can engage on a regular basis. And it's not so in the military, but it is essential in chaos. Covid is a great example. Like when we went into Covid, that was chaos. Every plan went haywire. Everything went haywire. And you do need leadership that does actually go into command and control. But the thing is that command and control only works when you have spent time building the trust up until that moment. Because when I tell you to follow my orders blindly, don't question me, just do it. There has to be the undying belief that you're making this decision for the right reason and you're not going to needlessly sacrifice me. And I know that 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. And 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, which is you can't 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, highly effective. And the team comes together in remarkable, remarkable ways. But the trust has to be built first.

You know, we have one of our colleagues in the audience who knows command and control. Sean Joyce, where are you?

He knows command and control because he was the deputy director of the FBI and also he was part of Hostage Rescue.

So he knows. Yeah, he knows what it is.

He knows about it. He still doesn't listen to me.

Yeah, ever.

What's up with that? We need to talk, Sean. Okay, so tell us about the whole thing about teaming and metrics.

What gets in the way of good teaming? What have you seen out there?

What gets in the way of good teaming? Well, 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. I mean, we're human beings, and I think we forget that, you know, that business is a very human enterprise. I mean, it's called a company, for heaven's sakes. I mean, it's literally a collection of people and, you know.

Passive aggression. And, you know, I've seen this in other companies where everybody's so nice, but there's no healthy. There's no healthy mechanism to release tension or have a fight or have a disagreement. And I think one of the big challenges that modern business faces, quite frankly, is we want good leadership, but we don't teach people how to lead. You know, when someone's junior in their career, we give them tons of training to be good at their job. Some people get advanced degrees. You know, MBAs or accountants, lawyers. They get advanced degrees to be good at their jobs. And when you get somebody who's new, you give them training and you'll let them apprentice with someone and shadow with somebody more experienced. And we give them huge amount of patience to learn what it's like to be at this company. Why? Because we want them to be good at the job. And if they're really good, they'll get promoted. And eventually they get promoted to a position where they're now responsible for the people who do the job they used to do. But most companies are very bad at giving those people any training for their new job, which is called leadership. And the reality is 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. And it's a different skill set. And the other problem is, because you're good at what you do, you actually do want to tell people how to do their job because you actually are better at their job. That's what got you promoted. But the problem is that's not your job anymore. And so there's a huge gap in the market. Again, fill this gap, you'll have a profound impact on the business world as we know it, because companies are dying. 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. And we saw the lack of the skill set really show up. You see it happen in more extreme circumstances, but it's available all the time. But after the murder of George Floyd, it's a great example. After the murder of George Floyd, there is a lot of leaders who did nothing. It's not because they're bad people. It's because they didn't know how to have a difficult conversation about race with their team. And they were so afraid of triggering someone or inflaming a situation or saying the wrong thing that they opted to do nothing.

Right.

That's a skill set. And we can teach that skill set. And it's. And it's not necessarily difficult. It just requires practice. So, for example, I need to have a difficult conversation with you.

What did you say?

I need to have a difficult conversation with you. I don't want to have this conversation because I'm afraid that I'm going to say the wrong thing. I'm afraid that I may trigger you. But I think it's more important for us to have this conversation than not have this conversation. So I'm going to need your help as we wade through this together. Together. That's how you start a difficult conversation. And so I think there's 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. It's a skill like any other.

Wow. Okay. No, this is good. Good.

Well said, well said, well said. I was watching one of your videos.

Around.

Goal setting and performance measurement. When you look at the trend lines, not looking at.

Oh, right, yeah.

Tell us more about your views around goal setting, performance evaluation. How do you look at high performing teams?

So this is sort of when you learn to embrace an infinite mindset. And remember, business is an infinite game. There's no winning business. So to ignore it is to literally play with the wrong mindset for the actual game you're in. So the more one learns to embrace an infinite mindset, the more you start to see opportunities for the way that we run our businesses. So, for example, goal setting is a great one. There's nothing wrong with setting goals. Human beings need goals. We're very visually driven animals. We need metrics. It's like you can't run a marathon without mile markers. It's actually unnerving. Right. We need to know how fast and how far. And that's what good metrics do. They tell us how fast our company is going and how far we've gone. But metrics need to be dials rather than absolutes. So, for example, goal. If you're a retail establishment, for example, goal. We want to open 200 stores next year.

Great.

And the problem is you're hiring so quickly and you're not spending enough time training because you've got to hit that 200 store goal, that you end up having a poor customer experience in most of the stores. And so they'll underperform or do badly. And so when you realize that you're hiring too quickly and you're not training properly, is it more important to hit the 200 goal or is it more important to dial it down and say, let's open 30 stores? We overestimated because. Because, let's be honest, most of our goals are arbitrary. A bunch of people sit in the room and go, wouldn't be great if we did 200 stores this year. And that's the corporate goal, you know.

And worse and worse and worse and worse. We'll incentivize everybody to hit that number.

You know, okay, I need to make sure that say something.

By the way, they're clapping.

We are not changing the forecast. Okay, all right.

They're saying, so there's nothing wrong with goal setting. Goal settings, great people like ambition. We like difficult goals. We like, we like. I believe in overestimating capabilities, but I also believe in tracking what's going on as you're driving towards that goal. And if you're breaking the thing, as you're going to hit the goal, okay, congratulations, you hit 200 stores 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 and 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. The other thing is I think trend data is really important. You know, 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, 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, the rise of shareholder supremacy wasn't really a thing prior to the late 70s. It was really popularized in the 80s and 90s. The rise of incentivizing executive based on the price of an equity rather than the performance of the 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 was 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 eh.

And the stock price goes up. Figure that one out. But when we announce increased spending on rd, stock price goes down. Figure that one out. But I digress.

The point is that.

That did not exist in the United states prior to 19. 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 stay, you know, and they quit and they leave and they're not, 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 I. And so I think we have a massive opportunity to reinvent the way in which business works and to.

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 with 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 did happen, 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 was 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's 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 that.

Why not you. That you develop a style of leadership and a curriculum of leadership, that you have a leadership program that 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 to 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.

You know, I didn't see this one coming. I like it a lot.

I had to make up. That's cool.

That's cool, man. That's good. That's what I'm talking about.

I had to make up for accidentally shitting on your vision statement.

It's right there in front of you.

So the first book that you wrote was Start with why. Right. So actually, a colleague in this room gave me the book many years ago. So why did you write a book? And what are some of the key takeaways from that book?

So 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. And it wasn't until a dear friend of mine came to me and said, something's wrong. That did I come clean and explained to her what I was going through. And it lifted a huge weight off my shoulders. And all of that energy that was going into lying, hiding, and faking, I redirected in finding a solution to rediscover my own passion. And there was a confluence of events. And I'll spare you the gory details, but there was a confluence of events. And I made this discovery based on the biology of human decision making, that every single one of us knows what we do. You know the products you sell, you know the job you do. Some of us know how we do it. Call it your unique selling proposition, or the things that you think are your strengths. But very few of us can clearly articulate, whether corporately or personally, very few of us can clearly articulate why we do what we do. What's your purpose, cause or belief that underlies everything. I knew what I did. I knew How I was better than everybody else, but I couldn't tell you why I was doing it. And I realized that missing piece was the source of my malaise. I became obsessed with understanding my why. And the most important thing was I learned how to help other people find theirs. And I just started helping my friends. And my friends started making profound life changes. And they would invite me to talk about it with their friends. I would literally stand in someone's living room and talk about this thing called the Y. And I would help people find their why for a hundred bucks on the side. True, true story. And people just kept inviting me to talk about it. And I just kept saying yes. And somebody said, you should write a book. And I shrugged my shoulders and said, okay. And before you knew it, it sort of became a thing. And I think the reason that both the TED Talk and the book gained such sort of organic popularity, because it was driven not by marketing, was driven by people saying, you should read this or you should watch this. It's completely organic.

Is because I think it resonates. I think it's a deeply human thing. It wasn't designed to be. To fill some market opportunity. It was something that was deeply, deeply personal to me and remains so.

And the key takeaways were, you need to start to understand, you need to.

Know why you do what you do. And have that be the foundation for everything that you do, whether as an individual or as an organization. Yeah.

You know, it's funny, because.

When we thought about this event today, my team actually asked me that question.

What's your why?

What's my why? Yeah. And why are you asking?

No, and by the way, it's. It's a very difficult question to answer. Not because we don't know it, it's because. And this is the biology of it. It exists in the part of the brain that doesn't control language. Our neocortex, which is our homo sapien brain, is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language. But it's our limbic brain, that sort of old mammalian brain, which is responsible for all of our feelings. It's also responsible for all of our decision making, but it has no capacity for language. That's why we have good gut decisions. I know all the advice I'm getting tells me to do X, but it doesn't feel right. I think I'm going to do Y. And you ask all the most successful leaders or entrepreneurs, what's your secret? They'll all say the same thing. I trusted my gut. Now there's no part of your stomach that makes decisions. What they're attempting to say is, I couldn't put it into words, but I could feel. And so we have a sense of our why. And if you have the confidence to trust your gut, it goes, you know, we've all done it, we've all ignored it, and we've all followed it. The opportunity to put that why into words makes it no longer simply a feeling that only you can follow. It now makes it puts into words that a. Gives you greater confidence in those decisions. It serves as a filter. But more important is you can share it with other people so that they understand the context of why you're making the decision, even though all the data and vices, we should do the opposite.

So I would tell you. So I thought about it.

Because sometimes somehow I was thinking you would ask me that question.

I didn't.

Yeah, you're right.

But I would tell you, though, it was. It took me some time to answer the question to your point because it's not.

It's hard.

It's a hard thing.

Yeah, it's a very simple but hard question.

And the answer was really soft. Soft words.

I choose the profession that I'm in today. I choose to be at PLC for three things. A, every day when I come to work, I learn something new and I become a better person.

Second thing.

I get energy.

I don't know how to price energy. It's not making more money, less money. It has nothing to do with this. I get energy from all of my colleagues. And the third thing.

A very, very strong belief that the future is bright for all of us. That's my why.

So that's magical. And I'll tell you why it's magical. Because it has less to do with you working at PwC and it has everything to do with who you are as a person. And I can guarantee you that the reason your friends love you is because of that. It's not just professional. And a good why isn't just professional. It's the foundation of who you are.

And when you say it's soft, as if you're apologizing for it, I think 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.

So, you know, I'm actually blushing, but you can tell.

But you're radiating.

So one of the questions, true, I've been asking you, what would you like to tell my colleagues? What's in mind coming out of COVID Not completely out, but, you know, the last two years have been difficult.

Yeah.

Leadership styles have had to change or evolve.

Yeah.

The millennials made decisions very differently than how they made decisions before.

What else 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. There's a little bit of real magic, which is when it. 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 and they said, are you okay? And they actually cared about the answer. And that's called good leadership.

And it was an organic and human reaction to crisis. But I would have loved to have seen it prior to Covid. And I hope that practice remains after Covid. 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.

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 soft. 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 a non empathetic scenario, fairly normal. You walk into someone's office and say your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row. We've had this conversation before. If you don't pick up your numbers in the fourth quarter, I don't know what's going to happen. That's a fairly normal scenario.

We don't do that here.

No Amongst your clients. Yeah, that's good.

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 ok? 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 that was so innocuous we didn't even realize it. For example, somebody did that. Somebody asked me how I was doing. They thought nothing of it, went about their day. And 10 years later, we still carry that gratitude to that person and that loyalty.

And I think we forget just how important. Showing up 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 active listening, 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 improve because of the skills that the office is teaching them, how to better interact with clients and copy colleagues. It's how to interact with human beings. And so all of the companies that I know that teach these skills, the number one feedback they get is my marriage is better, my relationship with my kids is better.

And you believe that if there is more of it in the workforce today.

We will be faced with less issues around people resigning and people going to other places.

I mean, yes, I mean, the great resignation I think is a market correction. You know, we know what happens to public markets when they become unbalanced. Right?

Laws of nature intervene. And there is a correction. That's what happens. And I think what we're experiencing is a massive correction in the labor market where for too many years, let's be honest, companies have taken advantage of their people, especially low level employers, because they could. And, and they actually had attitudes like, if you don't like it, you'll get a job somewhere else.

And we didn't treat people as human beings. We treated them as line items, disposable line items. And the front lines suffered the most.

And that balance got more and more and more tipped. And now what we're experiencing is a great correction where now.

Labor has much more influence and says, and thanks to Covid says, I don't want to be treated this way, and I'd rather have no job than this job. Now, remember, prior to Covid, fear of the unknown was enough to keep somebody in an okay job. Doesn't mean it was toxic. It was just fine. Right, but, like, who wants to be in a fine relationship? You don't mean a fine job either. Like, how was work? That was fine. You know, how's your marriage? That's fine. Right.

But the fear of the unknown was too scary. Why don't you quit? I would, but, I mean, I don't know. Right. And then Covid happened, and some people were furloughed, Some people lost their jobs, some people didn't lose their jobs, but they were filled with fear, and we made it through. And so all of a sudden, the unknown, a lot less scary because I made it. And so now when you give me fine I and you offer me unknown, I'll take unknown. And I'm really surprised by how many people are leaving. Look, you're going to have a small percentage of people who are leaving because of government checks. That's a very small percentage. And that goes away. You have a small percentage of people who are like, you know what? I want to be a singer, and I want to follow my dreams. We love that. Right. And that should continue. But there's a large percentage of people saying, I just don't want this, and I don't even know what I want. But it's definitely not this. And they're choosing. You've 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, as you know, it's not just junior ranks. But I think it's a great opportunity. And again, I think it's an opportunity for your practice that to help companies who are concerned about this to double down on culture and give people a place that they want to go to work, that they feel safe 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. I think they've, you know, you're used to solving business problems while ignoring culture problems. And look at a lot of the unicorns, you know, whether it's Groupons or Ubers or, you know, or GameStops, I mean, pick your not Gamestop, I mean Robinhood. Robinhood, yeah, 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 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, we know, struggling with.

Thank you. Thank you. Great remarks. Simon Sinek.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Great job, man.

Good job.

Thank you.

Good job. Thank you.