Simon Sinek explains why many corporate cultural-transformation efforts fail: they are run like top-down marketing campaigns and target the skeptical majority instead of early adopters. He draws on the Law of Diffusion of Innovations (innovators 2.5%, early adopters ~12–13%, tipping point ~15–18%) to argue you must first recruit and activate early adopters. Practical tactics include making initial programs voluntary, slightly selective (applications/essays), limiting seats, and inviting volunteers to co-create programs so grassroots demand emerges. He illustrates with examples: a large 200,000-person company pilot limited to East Coast offices, a workshop restricted to people born after 1984 with ~100 seats (125 mentioned), yielding 50 volunteers to build the program, and an executive workshop for the top 40 where 25 attended. Sinek stresses patience (months–years) and that success needs ~15–18% penetration to cross the chasm.
Questions this video answers
2.5% (the first two and a half percent).
About 12–13%.
15–18%.
About 10%.
Approximately 200,000 people.
Chapters
Here's the biggest mistake companies make when they're doing cultural transformations.
They treat it like it's a marketing campaign. Here's the launch date.
Right? And here are all the programs we're gonna make everybody go through. And here are all the PowerPoints. And here are all the executives that are gonna give the PowerPoints. You're nodding yes. I'm getting something right. Right. And then it doesn't work, or people are resistant or fight or don't show up or even sabotage. And it's all well intended. It's imperfect. And sometimes we get the cultural thing wrong or the timing wrong, but it's all well intended, and it falls flat, and it's a big waste of time and a big waste of money. And we're right back where we started, right?
There's something called the law of diffusion of innovations. This must become your best friend, okay?
The bell curve. All populations always sift across the standard deviation. If you have high performers, you have low performers, always. And then you have an average, always. In this room, there's a group of people I know who are nodding their heads going, yep, yep, yep, yep. There's a group of people who think I'm an idiot. And they're like, I wasted my money.
But most people are like, I'm open. Yeah, this is interesting. I like some of it. You know, I know that. I know that going in every single time. And the fact that you all wanted to come and pay to be here. It's not a general industry thing. Then I know that. It's just a little more one way or the other. But it's still the standard deviation. Always, right? What the law of diffusion tells us is that the first two and a half percent of our population are innovators. Big idea people. Steve Jobs, you know, Elon Musk. Then you have the next 12 to 13% of our population are early adopters who are willing to sacrifice time, money, and energy to be a part of something that reflects their own beliefs. They stand in line to see the new Star wars for eight hours, even though you can just go in a week and just buy a ticket and go in. They thought that was a good use of time and money, right? Then you have the next, the early majority, the late majority, and your laggards. The only reason these people do something is because they have no choice anymore, Right?
What you're asking for in cultural transformation is this. How do we change our company? Right? The problem is. The problem is this group of people, the majority. They're cynical. They're Practical. What's in it for me? What do I get if it goes wrong? Are you going to pay me extra if I have to stay late? They're cynical and they're practical. These people, not so much. They'll just do something because they think it's great and they want to be a part of it. What the law of diffusion tells us is that you cannot achieve mass market success or stickiness for a new idea until you achieve 15 to 18% market penetration. It is the tipping point. It is a social phenomenon. If you ignore everything I tell you today about this, you will always get about 10%. That's what you'll say. They just get it. We love them. They get it. And 10% of the company is going to be all in. It's not enough. And so this, that Geoffrey Moore called the chasm, crossing the chasm is the magical gap. And the way you get it is you don't talk to these people at all.
You ignore them. And you aim at these people only the early adopters, because these people do not want to try something new until someone else has tried it first.
And let me tell you how it looks, because I've done it. So a large company, many, many more people than is in your company, 200,000 people.
Wanted me to help them do a millennial training program.
So I said, great. I pull out my little pocket copy of the Law of Diffusion, because to me, this is religion, by the way. This is how I built my entire career. Remember that story I told you before? Convince me why I should hire you. He told me he was over here. He didn't tell me he was over here. I could hear that. I ignored him for now. I'll get him later, right? Someone else will get him later.
So here's what we did. What the company wanted to do was traditional. They wanted me to design the program. We're going to launch it. We're going to make videos. They want me to be on the videos.
And then we're going to have the training program, and we're going to force all the millennials to go through the training program. It'll be amazing.
And I'm thinking, it's going to fail. So this is what I said. I said, I'm going to do one workshop once, and we will make it open to anybody born after 1984 only, which means if you were born before 1984, you're not eligible. That keeps all the senior executives out.
So they can't come and watch. Make sure.
And the people who come in, we only have 100 seats, 125 seats. And they have to apply because I want people to put in extra time and extra energy. And the problem with the Internet is we've made everything easy. Let's try and make everything as so easy as possible. Click, click, click, click, click. You're in. No, I want to make things a little bit difficult. Right. So they had to fill out a proper essay and submit it. And we actually read all of them, and we could tell who was phoning it in, and we could tell who actually genuinely wanted to be there. And we selected.
100 people, and we only did it from the east coast offices just because it was convenient. So we did New York. It was on the East Coast. So New York and Virginia. Right. Just because it was easier. Maybe a few of the other offices. Actually, there was also Chicago and all that. Whatever. A bunch of the offices.
I gave this wonderful workshop, and at the end of it, I said, hey, guys, we don't have a millennial training program. We want to do one. So I'm asking for volunteers from this room to help build it. You're not going to get any extra money. You might have to work extra hours on your own time, and you may or may not have this included in your compensation or promotion packages at all. Who wants in? I had 50 volunteers who said that they were going to help build this program for no additional money and no particular personal benefit. It's because they believed in it. Right? Two weeks later, one of the senior executives from the company calls me up, furious at me. He's so angry at me. Do you know why? Because leaders from across the entire country were calling up, screaming at him, or, why don't we get a millennial training program? Why is it only on the East Coast? And I said, congratulations. That's called demand.
Because they all went back to work and said, this is amazing.
Had I done it the traditional way, those same leaders would have called up and yelled, why do I have to give up my people for an hour and a half every week? I am busy. We don't need. This would have been the exact same response.
So you want to make it slightly difficult, an invitation, voluntary, and invite them to actually help you build it. Because then it has a grassroots nature. And so now you're doing things from the top and the bottom. So you have the formal corporate stuff, always voluntary.
And the stuff from the bottom coming from them. And you help them and you give them resources, and then you create a scenario where you can check in with them and they can all check in with each other once a month on a conference call and all share best practices so that you can take something that's working in one country and try it in another country and you will learn from them and you'll give them resources and in time. I don't know how long, and this is why companies don't like this, it 100% works. I just don't know how long. One year, two year, three year, I don't know. Depends on the company, depends on the size, depends on the culture. I don't know. It 100% works. So if you're comfortable with the fact that it'll work, we just don't know when. This is your best friend, your early adopters. And you see, I'm very honest about it. I say we have this program, we're going to have this cultural transformation. We're going from this to this values based. We're looking for a few people who want to volunteer and four people show up. Great. Make it an amazing experience and make it a little bit difficult. I do this with senior executives. I did a workshop with the top 40. I did a workshop with the top 40 leaders of a major organization. They wanted to do a cultural transformation. So I hosted it as a non mandatory meeting on Saturday.
25 of them showed up. I knew that some of the good ones couldn't come because their children have a play or a game. And some of the bad ones came because they have to make sure that, you know, they're included in everything. But the majority were people who wanted to be there because I asked them to come on a Saturday and some of them had to fly in from across the country. And guess what? It was amazing. So make it a little bit difficult. And this. Go read about this. You can just go sit in the bookshop and read. Start with whites. Just. It's one chapter in there. You don't have to buy the book, just go read the chapter.
