Simon Sinek distinguishes finite-minded leaders, who panic and cut costs during crises, from infinite-minded ones, who see uncertainty as opportunity. He argues that how companies respond to COVID reveals their true culture, and contrasts newer firms like Airbnb with the Jack Welch era of short-term thinking.
Crisis is the great revealer, right? When there's a crisis, truth just is it just there, stark for everyone to see. Immediately we could tell who had the good cultures, who had the weak cultures, who had the good leaders, who had the weak leaders, like instantaneously, right?
And unfortunately, even though they struggled, a lot of the finite minded companies have not adjusted. You could tell who were finite minded and infinite minded from the get go. The finite minded panicked. That was their reaction. Panic. Because finite minded leaders fear uncertainty and hate surprises, which is why they like short time frames. Because you can exert more control over a quarter than you can over five years. I can actually make a pretty decent prediction over a quarter and have control of that. Maybe even a year, five years, I got nothing. Right?
Whereas the infinite minded leaders, they embrace uncertainty and think surprise is simply opportunity waiting to happen because they find creativity in uncertainty.
And unfortunately, the old guard, the companies that, you know, I have publicly railed against, who are extremely finite minded, I don't think they changed much. I think they reacted the way they used to react. I think they went to extreme cost cutting. I don't necessarily think that they did it in a noble way. They didn't treat people with dignity. Many of them saw Covid as an opportunity. We know some of those scandals, right? They took in PPP money when their numbers were fine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We saw it happen. They maintained a finite mindset even while others were struggling. And there was no sense of how do we help everyone. There was how do we help ourselves? There is a new breed of company that is emerging, that understands the infinite game and is challenging the old way of doing business, is a new breed of leader. It's Airbnb, I count as one of them. Sweet Green is another one. You know, these young, these young companies with these young forward thinking leaders, they're asking these questions and they, they don't like the way Wall street exerts uncomfortable and unbalanced pressure on public companies to do the wrong thing. Very often more companies are staying private for longer.
So they can maintain an infinite mindedness. And there is a few emerging leaders that I think are becoming the new heroes of business. You know, Jack Welch was a really bad example of what we should do in business. And yet he was the hero of the 80s and 90s. Well, think about the 80s and 90s. They would boom years like finite mindedness, like it was like was king. Turns out, you know, when you don't have a booming economy and world peace, it's much harder.
So I'm bullish that there's a new breed of executive, a new kind of metric, a new kind of culture where we have a return to people who want to give their lives to a company, as opposed to a year, a year, a year, a year, a year, which is simply a reaction to not feeling like I want to stay here for the rest of my life, which would be a reaction to finite mindedness. So. So I don't know if more companies embraced infinite mindedness, but it became clearer which ones had a shorter lifespan.
