Prioritizing People Over Profits | Simon Sinek

I have devoted my career to undoing everything Jack Welch ever did.

No, I mean that very, very seriously. That period of leadership in America, you know, starting in the late 70s, but really coming really sort of growing during the 80s and 90s, it broke capitalism. The capitalism that we have now is not the capitalism that made this country great. It's not the capitalism that Thomas Jefferson believed in. It's not the capitalism that Adam Smith wrote about.

Capitalism, when it works, is good for the customer. It's good for the employee. The capitalism that we have now is good for the leaders, and it comes at the expense of the employees and sometimes even the customers.

You know, Jack Welch popularized using mass layoffs to balance the books. That's profitable. Companies who use people's livelihoods to be more profitable when they were already profitable. We're not talking existential here. We're not talking about a sinking ship that needs to use layoffs to just survive. We're talking about. We're just not as profitable as we want it to be. There were no such things. There was no such thing as mass layoffs in the United States prior to the early 1980s. Didn't exist. It was used for existential reasons only. It was popularized in the 80s and 90s. Short termism, quarterly results wasn't really a thing. Shareholder supremacy wasn't really a thing. Even involvement in the stock market used to be for the middle class. Not really a thing anymore. So, yes, I want to see a return to the capitalism that made America great, where we take care of our people, our people take care of our customers, and competition is good for business.