Simon Sinek on Why Leadership Matters | Full Conversation

We are absolutely thrilled to have Simon with us today. The way we'll do this format will be about an hour and a half. A little bit will be dialogue and then really the floor is yours to ask him any questions. It is so fun to see so many friendly faces. This one is for our ACLI alums, David. Wow. And.

Let me just quickly go through a little quick intro. So thank you for joining us. I think when you left your program we said the learning doesn't stop there. And this is exactly what we mean by this. I have this plugin because I know I'm not going to have any time to do it later, which is our upcoming programs. We do have four that are coming up. We have our this is new design your work life. And that's with Bill Burnett from Stanford. We're kind of his partner here in Asia. And so this is all about kind of using design principles to create a happier, better life. It's a different type of program for us and from anything that you probably have done yourselves with us because it's only two days and so it's quite quick. And we're going to do many modules of this throughout the year. The second one, some of you are alums. I'm looking around the room of our HR Leaders program. We've decided to do this a couple of times this year. We have a HR Leaders program coming up in November, aflp. And I know there are a lot of people here from aflp, which is our program for our financial leaders. That one launches in November. And finally, this is a new one for us, an ASEAN Leaders business program which has been sponsored with Hitachi, who wants us to build something for the ASEAN region that has that focus. And so that's going to be something that's interesting. It's new and we're kind of really excited about putting together that curriculum. Okay, so for without further ado, let's go to the next slide. You know, I'm so happy to see so many of you here. When I Google Simon Sinek In 0.41 seconds, I get 7.2 million responses. It's true. This morning I just did it. And so there's so much that's known about him. And when it was shared that he was coming, he's here as a guest for a Formula One weekend. I had to get us in there. So we're really excited to have you here. Simon's written a number of books and I guess the other. Well, here are three there. He's actually written five. And I know that Some of you have read some. I hope that you brought some for to be autographed. But he also has the fourth most viewed TED Talk. Do you know that? Yeah, yeah, it's pretty amazing.

You know, I told my son that this morning, and I said, you know, you can come if you want. I said, you know, he said. I said, fourth most viewed TED Talk. I said, 62 million views. He goes, but I haven't seen it. I'm like, you better go watch it. So I sent it to him. Okay, wonderful. So first question, Simon, for you is, you know, there were 7.2 million results that came up. What. What's something about you that we wouldn't find on Google?

I mean, those are, like, about 18.4 million things.

Excellent.

I think most people don't realize that I consider myself an artist, not a business person.

And I love an artist's sensibility.

And.

The idea of, you know, art. I think an artist sensibility is about managing chaos. You know, I think that's where creativity comes from. It's the ability to find patterns in the middle of insanity. And it's not just fine arts or creative arts, but, you know, entrepreneurs as well. Not all. And I think it's also just as an aside, you know, there's a difference between a small business owner and an entrepreneur. A small business. Business owner owns a small business. An entrepreneur solves problems. And you have entrepreneurs inside corporations as well, and they don't necessarily own businesses. To me, an entrepreneur is a mindset, and it's a creative mindset, and it's all about chaos and managing chaos. So I think most people don't realize that about me, that I define myself as an artist, and that's how I sort of solve problems as well.

Excellent with the designer mindset. I love that, you know, you. I can't help but ask this question. We were just at a different talk, and I was kind of sitting there like, I really want to ask this question, but I really want to get into his talk. How did you get into this space?

You studied cultural anthropology.

Anthropology, yeah. Yeah.

Well, I mean, this is. This is anthropology. I mean, even when I was a student, you know, where many of my colleagues were fascinated by sort of like the Bongo Bongo and, you know, some other Amazonian tribe that had 17 people in it, you know, that made no sense to me. I wanted to. I was much more interested in this sort of our own lives and our own cultures. And so, you know, I lived in my own petri dish. I didn't have to travel Far and wide. For, for, for field work, I would go to bars and watch mating rituals. And I did an independent. Yeah, it's really fun. By the way. You can do it if you're so inclined. If you go to bars and restaurants to try and guess which couples are on a first date just by reading, just by reading the body language, it's easier than you think, but it's fun. You know, I find that entertaining and.

Or I did an independent study while I was in college on self confidence and leadership ability, because both people who are secure and insecure make, make both good and bad leaders. So what's the correlation? And so, you know, I was in student government and what they don't know is I wrote papers on all of them, on all the other people that I worked with. So I was always in it. And so I've always been curious about people and human behavior. And so I had an experience.

I started a business myself, I had a marketing consultancy. And superficially, everything was fine. We had a good business. We had great clients, you know, better clients than I should have for the, the years I'd been in business. We did good work. And I got to the point in after about four years in business that I didn't want to do it anymore. And the joy had gone. And I was very embarrassed because superficially everything was good. And so I didn't want to tell anybody, like, oh, I don't want to go to work anymore because, because it sounded like, oh, poor you, you know. And so I kept it to myself. And if any of you have ever gone through any kind of darkness, if you keep it to yourself, it just gets worse. And that's what happened to me. It got worse and worse and worse and I got paranoid and like, I was convinced I was going to go bankrupt. I was convinced I was going to get evicted. I mean, like all of the insanity, none of which was rational.

And I was really good at lying, hiding and faking and pretending that I was happier, more in control and more successful than I really felt. And it wasn't until a very close friend of mine came to me and said, something's very wrong. I don't know what it is, but something's very wrong. And I came clean. And when you have a friend who cares about you and you feel like you have someone who's got your back, you find the energy and the courage to solve what seemed to be unsolvable problems. And that's what happened to me. Once I had a friend who was co conspirator in my pain, all of my energy went into find a solution. And a solution that I found, which then became the golden circle. And start with why. I knew what I did, and I knew how I did it, but I couldn't tell you why. And I realized that was the crisis of passion. I'd lost my passion because I didn't know why. And the model that I put together, which has now become a thing, was only designed to help me. That's it. And it worked. So then I showed it to my friends, and my friends started making crazy life changes and starting businesses and quitting jobs. And then they said, well, you share it with our friends. And I literally would go to someone's apartment in New York City and stand in the living room and talk about a thing called start with why and help people find their why for a hundred bucks on the side. So it really was totally organic. This wasn't supposed to be my career.

That's an incredible story. Completely not expected. Great friend continues to be. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I love one of the things that you talk about is that leadership can be learned. We start a lot of our programs like that to talk about that there are qualities that you can learn and you can hone your leadership skills. Is there, you know, kind of going a little bit deeper? What do you think are the major attributes of a leader right now?

Yeah, and by the way, leadership is a learnable, practiceable skill.

We are firm believers.

But, yeah, I mean, that. That's what it is.

So, you know, much is made. Like, you see these articles in, you know, various business publications. You know, vision Charisma. You know, I know some amazing leaders who aren't big visionaries, and I know some amazing leaders who. They don't seem to have a lot of charisma either. Like, they're kind of like quiet and sit in a corner. Right. And yet they are great leaders. Having met.

A lot of them with various and diversified personalities. The one characteristic that I'm very, very comfortable saying that all of the leaders I've met have is courage.

And you could rank integrity there, but I think it takes courage to have integrity, to do the right thing in the face of overwhelming pressure to do something different, to speak truth to power, you know, all those integrity things, that takes courage. It is very difficult to lead. You know, I think we, We. We celebrate it, but I don't think people realize just how hard it is. The only analogy I would offer is parenting. You know, having a kid is so fun, but raising a kid is so excruciating.

Sorry, did I say that?

It was a little too quick? You little.

It's really difficult and it's often thankless and it's often lonely and it's often exhausting and it's often infuriating, it's often frustrating and you screw it up on a regular basis and you're like, that's it, I've screwed up my kid for life. You know, and yet for some reason, it's one of the most rewarding, if not the most rewarding thing you'll ever do in your life. For these unexpected glimmers. You know, when you catch your five year old sharing with your four year old, when you check to make sure your eight year old is sleeping, to find out that they're under the blankets with a flashlight reading, you know, the first job, the first school play, you know, all of these unexpected glimmers make all the sacrifice and exhaustion worth it. And leadership is the same. You know, leadership is.

Lonely, very often thankless, very often unfair. Like if everything goes right, you have to give away all the credit and everything goes wrong, you have to take all the accountability. Well, that sucks.

But it is those unexpected little glimmers, like when your team rallies around, help them to help each other. When someone, when somebody's struggling or when they solve an unsolvable problem and you sit back and you go like, yeah, that's my team. And it makes it all worth it.

Did you, did you, did you ever. Does the. Do we ever teach why leaders exist? Why we have leaders? Nope. This is interesting. What's that?

Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, no, but.

There was a movement for like five minutes where a couple of organizations attempted to be leaderless. Oh yeah, right. Or like the 99 movement in the United States was leaderless. And the minute organization says, we don't believe in leaders, I guarantee you it's going to collapse.

And not because it's not idealistically appealing, it's because it violates our biology and our anthropology. It just, it's not going to work. We are biologically hierarchical animals and this is not a bad thing. It is born out of necessity and evolution to help us survive. So if you go back in time, like 50,000 years ago.

Early Homo sapien from tens of thousands of years lived in populations no bigger than 150 people. Didn't change until we started farming about 12,000 years ago.

And there's a very practical problem that exists, which is as individuals, we're junk. We're not very smart, we're not very strong. But in groups, we're amazing. We're incredible at solving problems and lifting heavy objects in groups. And these are very dangerous times. And so we have to rely on each other. And so we make a deal, like, if there's danger, wake me up, you know? But these are all also austere times. We're all hungry, and the hunters go out, they bring back food, and they dump it on the ground. We all rush in to eat because we're all hungry. And if you're lucky enough to be built like a rugby player, you can shove your way to the front of the line. If you're the artist of the tribe, you get an elbow in the face. And this is not a very conducive system to cooperation, because if you punch me in the face this afternoon, probably not going to wake you and alert you to danger tonight. And so the tribe is going to get killed and the species is going to die. And so we evolved into hierarchical animals. We're constantly assessing and judging each other, where we sit in the pecking order. And sometimes that pecking order is formal. Like, we have ranked structures in our companies. And so I know who outranks me, and I know where I sit in the pecking order. And when someone outranks me, we show deference, right? Like, if you're a senior and you left your coat in the other room, someone will go get your coat for you. And if you're a junior and you left your coat in the other room, you get your own coat. That's just how it works, right? And if somebody famous or somebody that you know that is recognizable, so it's social status now, you'll hold the door open for them, and you'll come home and you'll even be like, I held the door open for Steen and Spielberg. You know, like you're gonna brag about doing something for someone that they can perfectly well do themselves. Because we like to do things for people who outrank us in the social hierarchy.

Once we assess that someone is alpha to us, we show difference. And so we allow our alphas to eat first. Our alphas get first choice of meat and first choice of mate. So I may not get to eat first, but I'm guaranteed a meal, and I don't get an elbow in the face. Good system for cooperation.

This exists today, by the way. If you are senior in the organization, you'll get a better parking space, you'll get a nicer office, you'll get a higher salary. And no one, absolutely zero people, are morally offended by those perks. Not A single human being is morally offended that someone who's more senior than you in the organization gets a higher salary. We might think you're an idiot, but we're not morally offended by it. Right, but here's the best part. The group is not dumb. We don't give our alphas all these perks for nothing just because you're senior. There's a deep seated social contract that when danger threatens the tribe, the person who's actually stronger, actually smarter, actually better fed, there's an expectation that you're going to rush towards the danger to protect us. That's why we gave you all those perks that are not free. And so we don't mind that our senior people have more. But when danger threatens the organization, we want to know that you're going to protect us, even sometimes before yourself. And then we will give you our love and our loyalty. Where the social contract breaks down is when the leader puts themselves first. So we've seen this happen many of times when there's scandals in organizations where a leader makes tons of money, which we don't mind. But when there is a bad economy, they announce huge rounds of layoffs and the leader keeps their fat sally or worse. There's no bad economy. We just missed our arbitrary projections that we told the analysts. So we're very profitable, just not as profitable as we promised. So you lose your job. And that's where the outrage comes from. The outrage comes from the fact that you violated the deep seated social contract. So the reason I say leadership is difficult. And the reason I say leadership requires courage is because we all want the perks of leadership. But how many of us are willing to fulfill our responsibility as leaders? And that's an entirely different subject. And where you command love and loyalty is if people feel seen, people feel heard, people feel understood, people feel like they matter and that you care about them as a human being and that they don't care. They'll give you all the difference in the world.

I'll finish with one story.

Many of you heard the story I've told about the ceramic cup, Styrofoam cup. No good. It'll be wonderful and new for everybody here.

True story. There was a former undersecretary of defense who was invited to speak at a large conference, like a thousand people. And in the middle of his remarks, he was holding a cup of coffee in a styrofoam cup. And he. And he looks down and he smiles and he interrupts himself and he says, you know, last year I. I was still, the undersecretary and I spoke at this exact same cup. And last year, they flew me here business class. There was someone waiting for me at the airport to drive me to the hotel. Someone had already checked me into the hotel. And I just went back. You know, they took me up to my room. I came down in the morning. There was somebody waiting for me in the lobby, and. And they brought me to the same venue. They took me through to the back entrance, and they took me into a green room, and they handed me a cup of coffee in a beautiful ceramic cup. He says, I'm no longer the undersecretary. I flew here coach. I took a taxi from the hotel to the. From the airport to the hotel. I took another taxi this morning to the venue. I came in the front door, found my way backstage, and when I asked somebody, do you have any coffee? They pointed to the coffee machine in the corner, and I poured myself a cup of coffee into this here Styrofoam cup. He says, the lesson is, the ceramic cup was never meant for me. It was meant for the position I held. I deserve a Styrofoam cup. And the great leaders all recognize that. You can enjoy the ceramic cup. You can enjoy the first class. You can enjoy the nicer office. Absolutely enjoy it. But they're not giving it to you. They're giving it to the position you hold, either in the company or in the social hierarchy. We all deserve a Styrofoam cup. And for the leaders that remember that, you'll do just fine.

You reminded me. So earlier today, Simon spoke to the civil service college to some of our senior civil servants, and in the civil service, people are referred to as dsp, et cetera. I remember asking the question, well, you know, isn't it nicer if we just say Pauline or, you know, et cetera? They said, no. It's actually. It's a reminder that it's the position.

It's not about them personally. It's about the position. So that story reminds me of that.

Yep.

Okay. A few other questions. And we've talked. We know that we've kind of gone through this crazy Covid situation.

Technology, another kind of big wave of change has disrupted the workforce.

What do you feel are, like, some challenges or. Or suggestions that you would have for us? I mean, it's a group of very, very senior leaders here with companies, business leaders. What suggestions would you have for us? Deal and cope with some of the changing tides as business leaders?

I mean, we know some of them.

A generation and population that doesn't want to come back to work.

Yeah.

A generation, largely generation that has a different definition of what full time employment is.

Who says I have to work full time for one company, I can work full time for two companies, but we pay you a full salary and we pay you benefits. You can't work for anybody else. Why not? I don't think that's been resolved of what the definition of full time employment is, especially when I don't keep normal hours.

What the definition of, of the value of a job is like. Some people want to have ambition and they want to move up the ranks and some people don't just want to get to work and make a bit of money and pay their bills and they don't really care about progress up. You know, they want to do good work and be treated well. They still take pride in their work. They're not lazy, they just, they're not career hunters, you know, that's something different. But yes, quiet quitting is also a thing, which I have an exception. I don't like the term quiet quitting because I think it's nonsense and I'll tell you why. Quiet quitting is what senior people say about junior people. But when we talk about ourselves we say, I'm looking for work life balance.

So it's so junior people don't say that they're quiet quitting what senior people say of junior people. But yes, that is still a thing.

So I think the, the way to combat all of these things or manage all of these things, look, the list goes on is to be very open and honest about it, to have a conversation and to make the.

Implicit explicit.

This is, it can be said of relationships of all kinds. By the way, when you take implicit tensions and you make those tensions explicit, even if you don't have resolution, it at least normalizes it.

So to say things like.

These are strange times where we don't really know what full time employment means. We say to the team or I know that many of us are still struggling with what kind of careers do we want? And do we even want to work here? Do I even want to work hard? Or what does that even mean? And just having the conversation out loud tells everybody, like, I know, you know, you don't have to hide these things. I know it's like our kids can't imagine that we ever got drunk or any of the things when we were younger. You know, it's like they forget that we were young at one point. Like all of the idiot things that they do. We've Done all those things.

Not me, of course, but.

Yeah, I was just going to say no.

But I think when you make it loud, it allows for discussion to happen. And so I try and do this even in my company, I try to relieve the tension by talking about these things. So even when we've gone through difficult times, we were hit very hard by the great resignation. I mean, I'm only a small team of 27 people, and we lost seven people over the great resignation, which when you're a little company over the course of two months, I mean, it's humiliating, it's debilitating.

There's nothing else we're talking about or thinking about. We're not growing or being ambitious or innovation. We're just praying another person doesn't quit this week.

And I was very open about it. I was very open, like, look, this is a really tough time and it's very difficult and I'm struggling with it and it's humiliating and embarrassing and I'm trying so hard to do the right thing. And people are leaving for different reasons, so there's not even one thing I can fix. And I, you know, but I'm. I want you to know I care and I'm trying. I was just very open about it. The irony is, is the team that I was left with is freaking out.

Amazing. Okay, good. Yeah, I mean, that's, I think, something that everybody's been experiencing. Right. Losing amazing people, that you've done everything that has worked in the past, you know.

Yeah, we let.

Feeding that. Yeah, exactly. Do you think that we're just in a new era where this is the new norm?

No, No, I don't. I think it's. The dust is not settled yet. You know, we didn't. Like I said, there's so many unanswered questions. And we were talking about a little bit at lunch, which is, you know, there's a group of people who don't want to come back to work because they like working from home. But the same group of people is suffering from increased levels of depression and anxiety. Well, well, of course, because you're all alone at home and you're not amongst people. You're not building relationship, which is how you manage stress. Relationships is how you manage stress. And so the problem is if we force them to come back to work, they're going to come back to work depressed and anxious because of the time they've been at home, which only reinforces their narrative that it's work that's making me depressed and anxious, and they want to go back home.

That is, as of yet, unresolved.

So there's a lot of that that's happening because remember how work was before COVID right? You go to work, and then after work, you meet your friends and you all vent about work.

You have a meal, you have a drink, and everybody complains about their boss. And then you go home and you repeat it, you know, and that's what Fridays and Saturdays were after work, you meet your friends.

Friday, right?

And then after Covid, when Covid struck that relief system, that very healthy.

Therapy was taken away because there was no after work. And so all we did was spend time with our colleagues and co workers on Zoom all the time. And then after work, we just did nothing. We played video games, we watched tv. And even if we called a friend, it wasn't hours of venting and hanging out, joking, and the therapy and the catharsis. It was taken away. And so stress went up dramatically. And because we still want to get it out, we took it out with the person who was willing to listen at work. And what we didn't know is everybody was talking to the same person.

And I don't think we realize what we've done to each other. And I'm not sure that that's been relieved. And that's yet another reason why coming back to work is important and why going out with your friends after work is important. In other words, staying at home the whole time is just not healthy.

Yeah, it's. We have a lot of HR LP alums here. This is the HR leaders, and you are trained to kind of turn that off. I'm looking at some heads here, because you get that as your job. But, you know, when it's the rest of the leadership force or just workforce, that's kind of. You're empathetic because that makes you also a good leader.

And. But you have to. You have to release yourself. You need to be able to go with your friends and vent about all the idiots who came to see you today. And I was like, that's fine. It's healthy. It's healthy. The venting is healthy because if you didn't, you would actually take that stress out on people.

So do you feel people should come.

Back if you like, to work?

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, we're 100 virtual company, but I've been 100 virtual for 15 years. And so what? We were really good at it. And when Covid hit, we're like another day at work. But we also recognize that being a distributed workforce is actually more Work, not less work. Because Isaac Stern, the famous violinist, said music is what happens between the notes. Well, in a company, trust is what happens between the meetings where you're talking to somebody as you walk into the meeting. You're talking to somebody when you walk out of the meeting. And that's usually where the decisions get made. You bump into somebody and I guarantee you it happened here. You were chatting with people you haven't seen in a while. How are you? Good to see you. When you're getting a coffee before you came in. And you're going to do it when you're done, right? And when you bump into somebody in the hallway, like, oh, I meant to tell you, oh, by the way, that client, let me tell you the decision that we made. And all these little, by themselves, innocuous interactions over the course of time build up in a thing called trust. The correlation is just look at any friend or relationship. Like, if you have a friend, you weren't friends on day one. It's all the little things that you. Eventually a friendship blossomed. It's the same thing. Well, we took that away. And so we as a company knew that. And so when you have a distributed workforce, it's not less work, it's more work. Because you now have to create all of those things artificially because there is no between the meetings, it's turn on zoom, have the meeting, turn off zoom. That's it. And so.

We used to do on Mondays, but now we do it on Wednesdays, but we do Wednesday huddle, where the whole team comes together, the whole company comes together. We're small and we talk about not work. We make a couple small announcements, and then whoever's leading huddle, they could do whatever they want. And we go into breakout sessions for 12 minutes with three or four people and we just talk about whatever. Did you see this movie? Oh, my God, my kids are driving me crazy. And it's very human. There's no discussion at work. But we do this because otherwise there's no socializing. And we encourage people to get on planes and visit each other in each other's cities and have hackathons to solve a problem. And we have an annual summit where we all come together. Annual off site. We come together so we still create human interaction in pockets. And we encourage people to use the telephone rather than zoom. Weirdly, it's a. I think it's a better medium. And I mean, I can tell you why. So zoom doesn't necessarily. So I'm a. I'm a pacer. I Do my best thinking when I pace back, insert forwards. So when I'm on the phone solving a problem, I can pace on Zoom. I can't. Okay.

Or it's fake eye contact. Right? So I'm staring at your eyes.

But that's not where my camera is. So what you see is this.

Right.

Or you spend the whole time looking at yourself because you know, where's the eye you are? You know, so you're staring at yourself. There's some great human connection. There's.

Or there's excessive and weird politeness, right? Like everybody's on mute, and then you unmute to speak, and then you mute and never interrupt anybody. Well, have you ever been in a real meeting? It's noisy and you interrupt each other all the time, and nobody's offended by it because it's idea generation and things are happening. And this is why you cannot have brainstorming on Zoom, because it's not chaotic. And so I've tried it in small. You can't do it on a big meeting, but, like four or five people, I make everybody stay unmuted. I want interaction. I want interruption. I want a little bit of madness, and it's better.

But it's all fake. And I find that when you pick up a telephone, weirdly.

It'S less polite. And if somebody's distracted on Zoom, you can tell when somebody's typing.

You can see when they're distracted, but nobody says anything. You just know that they're distracted.

Where.

If you're on the phone and somebody's doing something, are you typing? Can you stop typing, please? Totally fine. Totally acceptable. I think the phone is just a better medium to actually have a real connection and a productive conversation. Where I think Zoom is good for basic stuff.

I love that sometimes in a meeting, you'll get a letter or an email from somebody else who's in the meeting, and then you know that they're not even paying attention to the meeting that you're both on.

Oh, and we're all women. Even our meetings, we're constantly sending direct messages to each other, you know, through Zoom.

Yeah.

You know, do you agree with this? You know.

But creativity and brainstorming does not work over Zoom. Fact. Does not work. Does not work.

Great. Okay, so we're going to bring it back to the.

So it takes more work. It's harder. Harder to have a virtual company. And most companies don't put in the work. Like, to have a whole meeting where you don't talk about work. Companies don't want to do that.

It's very true. I don't know if you have the answer to this question.

I can guarantee you I have an opinion.

Okay.

Very likely. So you've been advising lots of different companies and, and you've, you've traveled quite a bit. I think this is your first time, though, in Singapore.

Oh, it's my third.

Is it really? Okay, great. Somebody had given me incorrect information. Do you have you like, noticed, huh? Yeah. Okay, thanks. I love it.

So it's really maybe not that long. No, no, no, no, it's not that long. The last time I was here was probably.

Probably, probably been a decade. It's probably been 10 years for leadership stuff. Yeah, yeah. I came here for Apple actually. They had a big summit here and I came. I think that was the last time I was here with Joel Pelloni.

I remember that.

No, it was an education summit.

Okay.

Anyway.

Okay, yeah, anyway, we'll go down memory. I almost forgot my question. We're both very jet lagged, but my question is, have you noticed any differences in leaders in leadership in Asia versus the other countries that you have consulted with?

Simple answer is yes.

Oh, great. Tell us more.

Yeah. So.

There'S two, two, two things I would, I would propose.

There's this idea of honor that has been lost in the west, in the United States, like nobody. Like, the concept of chivalry is gone. And the word honor is not used in business. It's not even used in society. In the United States, you would never describe somebody as honorable. Now, if you come from the military, yes, they still use the term honor. I'll call somebody in the military and be like, hey, do you like this guy? Like, oh, yeah, yeah. Super honorable, you know, and honor has nothing to do with trustworthiness or intelligence or reliability. You can be all those things and still be dishonorable. You know, to me, honor is the willingness.

It's not taking advantage of somebody's pain for personal gain. It's putting aside the leverage that you may have because of the right thing to do, you know?

And I find that that concept of honor still exists here, which I think is important in business. I'd like to bring it back to the United States and I do, I talk about it. So there's still a sense of honor, like your word, your reputation, that it's not just transactional and it's not just who's got the best deal. You want to do business with honorable people. So that still exists. Which leads to the second thing, which is relationship, which is here you have meetings and the entire Meeting goes by, nobody talked about business. You talk about all kinds of other things and it's about getting to know somebody in relationship and looking them in the eye and can I trust you? And in the United States, it's become excessively transactional where we will do business with people who we may not like because it's a better deal. Where in Asia, I think I'll turn down a good deal because I don't, don't know if I like you. You know, I don't know if you're a good person.

And I, I think that's good.

So the value of relationships, the value of spending the time to build relationships before you get, create a business relationship, I think is still very alive here and take pride in that. It matters.

Yeah, that's something to definitely be proud of. So I'm going to go to you now to any questions that you might have for Simon. So, David, you want to ask your question?

Thank you. Just to follow on from your point about honor, is that something that leaders in the west have caused the loss of honor or, you know, coming back to the point, why leadership matters, how did that come about? But the first question I really wanted to ask was, when you lost your passion, was there something that happened that caused you to lose your passion? And did you try to reignite that passion before you thought and then your friend came along? I don't know why I lost it. I don't know couldn't. I don't, I don't know what events happened. I think what happened was, I mean, I can tell you some of the circumstances which I'm sure contributed to it, which is, you know, when you start a business, it's exciting. There's a statistic that hangs over your head that over 90% of all new businesses fail in the first three years. And so that's. If you're a little bit competitive and you like bad odds, that's fun. And I beat that. I now joined in a very elite group in the world that said, you've survived three years. And my fourth year became about building. And I realized that I had built a business out of force of personality. I was in every meeting, made every decision. I was chief cook and bottle washer. And when you start to have some success, you get even just a little bit of scale that doesn't work.

And I didn't have the skill set on how to build a structure. I could just run on force of personality, which is fine if you want to be a solopreneur, but you can't Build a business that way. And so I think what I had reached, I reached a Peter principle where my ability to build structure.

Capped out. And I didn't want to admit that the single best lesson I learned out of that whole experience was. And the biggest mistake I've made in my life is I don't have to know everything, and I don't have to pretend I do. And so since that day, I've learned to say, I don't know, I need help. And turns out I was always surrounded by people who wanted to help me. They just didn't know I needed it because I never asked.

And so I'm really good at saying I don't know. And I need help now. And don't build anything by myself. And don't feel like I have to. I don't feel like I have to be the smartest person in the room. I don't feel like I have to have more credibility than anybody else. I don't mind any of those things. I let go of all of that baggage. And a lot of us still carry that baggage that we think if we're in the leaders, we have to have all the answers. We have to be the smartest person. We have to be better at everybody else's job than they are, because that's what makes us a leader. We falsely confuse. Our credibility as a leader is not tied to our intelligence. It's tied to our ability to see those around us rise. That's what it means to be a leader. So if you can shed those demons.

It'S pretty empowering. I think the west has lost its honor. I think it's been a steady drumbeat. It's been a slow decline. I don't think it happened overnight. There's no one event. But in the 1970s, Milton Friedman, the economist, theorized that the responsibility of business was to maximize profit within the bounds of the law. No mention of ethics. And that definition, which was just a theory, was embraced by a class of leader, corporate leader in the day. And they used it to justify new behaviors in business. So, for example, the concept of mass layoffs to balance the books, which is now normal. CEOs very comfortably go on TV and say, we missed our numbers, we're having a round of layoffs. You're profitable, just not as profitable as you promised. So normal. They just do it very openly. That did not exist as a behavior, did not exist prior to the 1980s. Didn't exist. You only had layoffs for existential reasons.

The Jack Welch. The rise of Jack Welch, who I think I am trying to undo everything he did. I think he was a terrible human being who basically perpetuated concepts of short termism, rank and yank, pitting our people against each other inside our own companies and creating internal competitions.

Just everything that violates every good tenet of leadership. Welch did the opposite. He wrote a book called.

Winning.

He wrote a leadership book and put his own face on the COVID I mean, that tells you everything.

And the problem was that became the model. And there's an entire generation of leader that was raised in the 80s and 90s on Milton Friedman and Jack Welch theories. And what they did was they broke capitalism, what America has today. And only because America's so rich, so goes America, so goes the world. And so as American capitalism became bastardized, the rest of the world started copying American capitalism because it made a lot of money. So now that American capitalism of short termism and rank and yank and all this nonsense has now spread outside the borders to the detriment of global economies, I would add. And.

This is not Adam Smith capitalism that made America great. This is a new version of capitalism which is extremely short termist and extremely broken. And the result is we're seeing a rise against capitalism. There's a populist movement afoot in the United States, whether it's Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, left and right, whether it's Hungary or Brexit or all of these things, they're all populist movements against capitalism now. They're confusing capitalism and this version of capitalism. We want to reform capitalism, not eliminate it. It's a good system, but it's very broken. The decline of the middle class and the stock market, all of these things. The violation of the social contract of leaders, all of it, all of it.

And I think that's contributed to the lack of honor, which is. Jack Welch was not an honorable businessman. He was a Machiavellian stab you in the back if he needed to, to make a buck. And it became normal. And it took about 20 or 30 years for him to break it. It's going to take us 20 or 30 years to fix it.

That's why you have to do a really good job. No, no, I'm not even joking. You go to a program like this to learn a kind of leadership that is different than the 80s and 90s models that has become normalized and standardized today. So that if you get it right and you build the companies you work for in the manner that they need to be built, then we will restore a belief in capitalism or we will Restore a belief in trust and cooperation up and down the chain of command where we trust our leaders and our leaders trust us. We will restore a model where people will happily give 10, 20, 30 years to one company rather than one year. One year, one year, one year. We will restore a model where we derive tremendous joy from our work rather than tremendous stress.

There's a lot at stake here. That's why programs like this really, really matter.

And your biggest challenge is to invent new incentives because all the old incentives reward quarterly or annual performance and basically nothing else. There's very few companies that have successfully figured out incentives and reward structures for cooperation, teamwork and things like that. The performance stuff is fine, but it's woefully unbalanced.

It's a great call to action. Everybody here has to say, okay, Yulin, I asked you, maybe you can introduce yourself and your company because now I really know.

Don't worry about the microphone. I'll repeat the question.

Hi, my name is Evelyn from great place to work. And we agree that leadership matters. The reality is leaders today are very tired. There's so much expected of them. How can we encourage a heart of.

Leaders across the organization?

And you talk about courage and how could we build courage if leadership is a learnerable trait?

It's a very good question. It's a very hard question.

What's that?

That's what I asked.

Oh, you're very kind.

You know.

This sounds corny, but group therapy is a thing, right? Which is we talk about leadership being lonely and complicated and that we're constantly putting on a mask and acting like we have all the answers and being tough and nothing phases us. And some of that's important, but not to the point of self destruction or lying, hiding and faking. And there is a need for leaders to be able to vent themselves and have catharsis and ask for help. There's a very important case study.

I've written about it in the Infinite Game. Or you can go back to the original HBR case study. It's on the Shell Ursa. U R S A the Shell Ursa. I think it was an oil rig, an offshore oil rig, and I think it was the 1980s and when the time when it was built was the largest oil rig in the world, right? And when you're launching something that big and that complicated, you're concerned about all kinds of things. And so they found a guy and they said, you're going to lead, you're going to be in charge of the crew of the Shell Ursa. And as he was preparing for it, it was in the news that this oil rig was going to exist. And this weird hippie sort of San Francisco business consultant reached out to, to him and basically said, I have something for you to try. And he was weirdly open minded. And he was willing to go to a workshop that she was running in San Francisco with his son. And it helped him restore a very broken relationship with his son. And so he agreed to bring some of her thoughts and theories to his crew. And what he did is months before they launched to sea, he had all his crew. And I'm talking. These are tough guys who work in oil rigs. These aren't the leadership. This is the guys who run the oil rig. And he had them sit around in a circle and it got very extreme. I wouldn't recommend this. Like they were giving each other foot massages.

Don't want to do that. It's like they were giving each other foot massages.

Don't want to do that. But they. He forced them to talk. And it took a few rounds. But one by one, people started opening up. For example, one guy had a son who I think was struggling with some terminal illness, and nobody even knew he had a son, let alone a son with a terminal illness. And there was crying and there was hugging, and they were holding space for each other, and they learned how to listen and they learned how to hold space for each other and they learned how to be vulnerable. Right? I would call it human. They learned how to be human around each other. And then they went out to the oil rig and something happened which is turns out that when you learn to be comfortable being vulnerable with someone, that you are much more willing to say, I need help, I made a mistake, something's gone wrong. And on that oil rig, the accident rate was one of the lowest, if not the lowest, in all of the Shell organization and the entire industry. And their performance was one of the highest.

And I think that's lacking in business because it's uncomfortable. We don't want to do it. Who wants to do that?

Right?

But I think to create spaces where people learn how to hold space for each other. And it doesn't have to be all personal, but I actually think the personal stuff's important.

And I'll just give you one example, which is Covid. Every single person who went through Covid suffered trauma. Everyone.

And every single person at some point over the course of COVID got depressed. Everyone didn't happen at the same time. And I went through mine about four, five Months in, I went through mine, and I didn't know what was wrong. I was off my game. I was struggling. I didn't know what it was. And I called a friend of mine who was in the military, and I said, how do you know when you're suffering from the trauma of combat? And he said, well. And there was no leading questions. I just asked him a very open question. No leading answer. I mean, and so. Leading question. And he said, well, he says, I fall out of my sleep cycle. I start going to bed very late and don't want to get out of bed in the morning. And I went, yep. And he said, and I become.

Really unproductive. But I rationalized him, like, oh, you've been working hard. It's okay. You just had an unproductive day. No big deal, except I have another and another and another. I went, yep. And he said, I become really antisocial. I don't want to talk to anybody, and I definitely don't want to ask anybody for help. And I went, yep. And I realized I was suffering trauma. And so the next question was, well, how do I deal with it? And he said, well, I forced myself back into a sleep schedule. Okay, I can do that. He says, I allow myself to be unproductive, but I tell my team that I'm unproductive right now, and I force myself to ask for help.

And so I did that, and I went to my team in an open phone call on a whole team. I said, I'm going through something. I don't know what it is. I'm not. Don't rely on me right now because I'm struggling, and I'm just not that helpful right now. I'll be okay. Don't worry about me. But I just need you to know that I'm not in a good place, but I'm aware, and I did it out loud. I did that to my team, which I think a lot of leaders would never do.

And it did two things. My team was patient with me. They held space for me. They picked up work for me that I would. Ordinarily, they would have been frustrated because I had let them down and everything was fine. But the most important thing was because I had set the example other people were willing to say when they were struggling and we could support them, where if I had put on a brave face every day, everyone would have put on a brave face every day, and then it would have gotten worse. And so that idea of catharsis. I did it with a bunch of police chiefs recently. America is having a bit of a policing problem.

Understatement. And so I gathered a group of really forward thinking, modern progressive police chiefs and I brought them in a room, there's about 15 of them and I led the way. I went first, I said, look, there are many things that I struggle with as a leader because it's lonely and I have insecurities. And let me tell you what some of them are. And one by one they all started to open up in a way that they never have. Because who are they opening up to? They're the chiefs of police. Like who are they going to tell? And they're definitely going to tell each other without me because they're all cut. And they all one by one started opening up about their struggles, their fears, their insecurities. I mean some deep stuff that they were revealing was incredible. And even the ones who never talked, some people didn't open their mouths, came up to me afterwards and said thank you, I needed that. Just the ability to hold space. And they all went back supercharged. And so there's something to be said for giving leaders a safe space. And by the way, you don't have to do it in your own company. I assume you built relationship as you went through these classes.

That should be your team. I don't know if you have that. But those safe spaces for you to be fully open where there's no judgment and you can talk about anything in any difficult terms you want. I can't tell you how important it is.

For mental fitness. It is so important.

And it gives us the goes back to courage, learning to do it in circles like this. You will have more courage than you realize to do it at work and know how to help people at work and do it amongst themselves and especially as HR professionals. I mean, can I wax on about HR professionals?

Absolutely. We've got some star, star, star HR professionals here, so please do most.

I can't speak about Singapore, I can only speak about the United States. But most HR departments are a complete waste.

Because they don't know what their job is. They think their job is to do the bidding of senior management and they get rewarded for how efficiently they did the layoffs.

And any large company that says if you have a problem, come to hr. You have got to be kidding.

No one trusts hr. I am not telling HR any problem I'm having, you will use it against me. Right? And I saw it happen firsthand. It was absolutely abhorrent. A good friend of mine who's an executive at a large company who will Remain nameless.

But you know, the company.

Oh you know, the company.

Had a, had a problem with an employee, somebody who reported to her there was a tension between them and this employee thought that she was out to get her and it was bad. And so HR got involved. I think one of them went to hr.

Lodged a complaint about the other app. I think the junior one lodged a complaint about the senior.

And my friend called me up and said, what do I do? I'm having a meeting with me, my direct report and the HR representative. What do I do in this meeting? I said very simple. The problem is the person doesn't feel heard. That's, that's all this is. Okay? So you have to create a space where they feel heard. That's it. Not have answers, not correct the fact she's going to say things that are wrong. Because you told me what happened in the scenario and there's a misunderstanding and it's just factually wrong, but don't correct them. Right? That is your strategy. Right? So my friend went in and said, tell me, tell me what happened. And she vented and she said, go on, tell me more, what else? I coached her, you know, go on, tell me more. What else? Go on, tell me more. What else? Go on, tell me more. What else? Good old fashioned listening, right? And at the end.

She felt good, she felt heard, she felt seen, she felt understood. And the idiot HR executive said, do you want to tell her what you want to do now? And my friend went, no, no. Because what I told my friend is that's the best outcome. Three days later you can call up and say, can I tell you my, my view on this once the emotion has settled. You can't do it with a high state of emotion. And she's now open to hear your side of it when she's rational again. Right. And the HR executive, the HR representative is like, would you have to tell her what, what you're. And my friend's like no, no, no, I'm good. This is great. This is literally great. And the HR executive literally was pushing her and then started getting involved and saying, well you said that and literally broke it. And it was excruciating that this RHR executive was not trained on how this very simple, very common experience on how to relieve tension, which is it's going to be multi pronged. It's not going to be one meeting and then everybody's done. Because everybody gets their turn to speak. No, no, no. The person who feels wronged needs to feel heard. That's it.

And The HR executive made it worse.

So.

I think there's a massive opportunity for the HR profession to be professionalized and reformed. Where the HR is the voice of the employee at the executive table. That is your job. That when the executives say, we are going to have a round of layoffs, the HR should be saying, hold on, hold on, hold on. What's the issue? Well, we need to save 10% of expenses. Okay, okay. Let me go back to the people that I represent. I'm the voice of the people here. You're the voice of finance. You're the voice of operations. You're the voice. I'm the voice of people. So I'm representing them here. I'm their union leader.

Let me go back to them and see if we can find 10% somewhere else. And you go back to everybody say, guys.

They got to save 10% and they are willing to do layoffs. And I want to make that the last resort. How can we all band together and find 10% of savings? Let's do this to help each other better. We should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot. How are we going to figure this out? That's HR's job. Not be like, okay, you need to do layoffs by what date?

And I think there's a massive opportunity. And it goes back to honor and it goes back to trust, and it goes back to all these things, which is HR can fix many of the broken ills and poor leaders in all the other positions.

Makes me think of some. And I'm going to get to the question in the back. In some offer letters here, there's actually a statement, I know this is for public service, that you can take away 20% of the salary for times like that. And the idea is that rather than firing to put that in the contract, it is actually in the contract.

Exactly, exactly.

Which, by the way, makes morale go up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Okay.

All right, I've said my soapbox about hr.

Let's go to the back. And then. Chuck, is it okay? Yeah. Hi, my name is Chini.

I'm from Temasek. I just wanted to pick on a.

Point which you raised about the fact that we want to have a new capitalism where people are incentivized to work in a place for a long time.

Rather than sort of one year.

One year.

One year, yeah.

Which is really what our young people do. They move from job to job. Is that a failure of leadership or is it a new reality that we need to deal with?

The former It's a failure of leadership. Right? Because when people feel taken care of, when people feel trusted, when they feel like they belong, when they feel like their work means something, they're working towards something bigger than themselves. Why would they leave? Right? You have to understand. We have to understand. We have to remember that because things like Jack Welch and layoffs have become so normalized that young people have grown up in a capitalist system where they watch their parents lose their jobs through no fault of their own. It's not a meritocracy. You worked for a company for 20 years. You did good work. Sorry. Nothing personal. It's just business. We missed our numbers. So they've watched it happen. They've watched the company not take care of their parents. And so they've been raised not to trust companies. Why should they? I think they have it right. And so they come in inherently cynical and inherently expecting that the company would happily use their job to help itself and then stupidly demand loyalty back. I don't blame them. The company sets the rules of the game. The people are just playing by the rules the company set, which is no loyalty. Or when hardship happens, the first thing cut is like all the leadership programs, you know, it's the first thing that's cut. It should be the last thing to be cut. Well, I can't measure the ROI on that, can I? You can over time.

So I don't think it's just some reality because at the end of the day, great organizations that are well led have no problem with young people leaving every year. They just don't have it. You know, onesies and twosies, sure, but not nothing significant. There's plenty of companies that come out tremendous loyalty from young people because they're well led. So I don't think it's a new reality. I think it is yet again a condition of a broken capitalism.

Okay, Chuck. And then in the front, Chuck.

Hi, my name is Chuck Ng. I have spent 27 years in corporate, mostly imbued with the thoughts of Jack Welch, Capitalism, Milton Friedman, you name it. It's like an AA meeting. Yes, yes. Let me start with a journey of vulnerability.

So you can imagine the first time I saw a Simon Sinek video, my first thought was, what is this guy all about? What is he on? And that's the reality of it. If you've gone through the 80s and 90s listening to the Jack Welch thought, the Simon Sinek school of thought is, oh, I'm an idiot. It's jarring. I'm an idiot. Yeah, right. Yeah, I'M unrealistic, idealistic and naive. Sure, but.

I've been called those things. Your words, not mine. Your words. No, no, I've been called those things. Firstly, I want to thank you for the inspiration. I think I speak on behalf of many in this audience.

Thank you.

And on that, I think that the next step from inspiration. Don't worry, Doris. It's a question. There's a question coming.

On. The next step of inspiration is aspiration. I think we all have aspiration, genuine aspiration, to bring about the Simon Sinek school of thought.

But it's difficult because you've actually explicitly acknowledged that human beings are anthropologically hierarchical. For survival instincts, all those who did not want to acknowledge hierarchy died. So this is what's left.

But as you also said, it takes another 20, 30 years to get to the new way of handling hierarchy. I'm talking about us in the context of knowing that Jeffrey Pfeiffer's book on Seven Rules of Power is. Is still the most popular course in Stanford. I'm talking about the world where Robert Greene's 48 laws of power is still somewhat good reading. And then that's you. So we're going to stage this in. And my question is, how are we going to stage this in? So how do you run a marathon? Tell us. One step at a time in the right direction. Nobody said it would be easy, and nobody said it would be fast. And I'm okay with that as long as we're marching forwards. You know, I just had Robert Greene on my podcast. I don't think we've released the episode yet, because I read his book and I was like.

There you go. Thank you.

And then I stopped reading. I'm like, I can't even do this, you know? So I, like, brought him on the podcast, and I was ready for a fight.

And he's lovely. He's absolutely lovely. And I understand why he wrote that book. And he talks about it. He and I had a wonderful conversation. What's missing from that book is the context, Right? Which was he was 38 years old, and every job he had, he was trying to be a writer.

He was subjected to people who stole his ideas, stabbed him in the back, screwed him over and over from the age of 21 to 38. Just people who were threatened by him fired him, just over and over and over. And he was exhausted. And he happened to be walking with a guy. He was a publisher. I'd love you to write a book. Do you have any ideas? And he thought, you know what? I'VE been subjected to people who are jostling for power. And I'm going to write a book, How I Perceive Power, basically to warn everybody. Put your guard up. Stop being so naive. This is what the world is. It's a little bit cynical, but that's basically what it is. The problem is he wrote it that some people read it as a manual.

But it's really a warning. Be aware of how your enemy works so you won't be taken advantage of.

Because it's really how to manipulate people.

So when you ask like, you know, what do we do? Well, first of all, you write about the curriculum, which is the people who teach a lot of that stuff, they come from those Jack Welch ideologies. So of course they're going to choose those books. The good news is folks like me and Brene Brown and our books are starting to show up and at the very minimum, if they show up on the same syllabus, so at least there's a debate or better, they're replacing the old guard. So there is a movement and I also think the practical movement is the leaders themselves. For you in your own organization to say, I reject the Jack Welch way that I was raised in, I have seen the damage it causes. We have seen economic hardship caused. We've seen families destroyed by short termism and selfishness and shareholder supremacy. And I will not lead and I will do everything I can to support this organization, to change the way in which we lead for the good of the company. And by the way, you look at the best organizations like.

Apple never had layoffs. I think they've had them. Pixar had them once and they regretted it. These great organizations didn't do these things.

So there's good case studies from the companies that we consider the exceptions. Well, there's a reason there are the exceptions.

So I think as a practical matter, which is this is the army right here and you can't. And look, I get this question all the time, Simon. I buy into all your stuff. It's wonderful. Thank you very much. But I'm not CEO. How do I change the organization when I'm not in charge where there's like four levels up above me, what am I supposed to do? And the answer is, of course you can't change behaviors of somebody you have no contact with, even to somebody people you do have contact with. No number of anonymously sent books to senior executives is going to change the way they lead.

Although I encourage you to keep trying.

And the reality is you take responsibility for the environment you can control. So if you have influence over seven people, people to the left, people to the right, even the boss above you, they're still a human. And even if they're difficult, let's have empathy. Maybe they're difficult because we don't understand the pressure upon them. And if we just work to create this little pocket of magic, what you tend to find is when you have well led teams, those teams outperform all the other teams. And so senior leadership either leaves you alone or they at least are curious and they're like, what are you doing? Or somebody from the team will eventually get promoted out to another team and bring all the lessons that you taught them and lead that team the same way. And then you have two magic teams and then somebody there gets promoted and you have four magic teams and you have eight magic teams. And then the CEO moves on and retires. And before you know it, the tail wags the dog.

Having a top leader who understands this stuff just means it's more efficient. But it doesn't mean it's the only way. We have to remember, power always belongs to the people. That's why dictators fear people and have fake elections, because they want to give the appearance of popular support, because that's where power is derived from. But dictators fear the people, which is why you can't get close to a dictator's house. You have to stay three miles away. And the army's given orders for shoot to kill. The people always have the power. Always. And so what you do is you create these magical ripples inside an organization. And you don't even need to convert everybody. It's law of diffusion. You only need about 15 to 18% of the company to fully embrace the ideas. And that's it. Tipping point. So don't worry about the CEO, don't worry about the company. Just worry about what you can control.

Thanks, Simon. It's easy. It's easy for me. I run my own company. Then you have efficiency. Then you have efficiency.

Okay, we have a last question.

Hey, Simon. I. This is Ian Wong from uob. An honor to be here. We mean it. Thank you. So the question is aging workforce. Yeah. So what would be your.

Maybe words of wisdom on how leaders should organize themselves to rejuvenate the aging workforce, especially in today's BAU business, is unusual. So that's my first question. The second question is, given the AI narrative, how do you authentically inspire the youths, the young, that there's going to be a great future with good jobs.

To come? Yep. So let's talk about aging workforce first. So.

Everyone wants to feel seen, heard, and understood. Everyone's to feel like they matter, right? And an aging workforce starts to feel like nobody cares about them, they don't matter. There's ageism, all the rest of it. If I'm a certain age, I can't get a job. You know.

First of all.

All of the empathy we apply to a young group, we have to apply it to an aging group. That's a big part of it. The other part is I always believe in asking people to solve their own problems. One of the mistakes I think we make in business is as leaders, we think we have to have all the answers and solve all the problems. Take anything.

Where we commission studies and we look at the data, and then we make decisions, and then we implement a program and we have a rollout schedule, and we have a change management consultant, and then here you go. And at no point do we ever go to the people who are actually going to be affected by our decisions and say, here's the problem we have. We're completely open to what we would do. Can you bring us some suggestions on how you would solve this? Or you can do with two or three different groups to get two or three different points of view. And I love asking people to solve their own problems because A, gives them a sense of ownership, and B, you're going to get ideas that you never had.

And I'll give you one bad example, but it'll make the point. So this company that I talked about, Barry Wehmiller.

It'S a manufacturing company. So they have a big factory, and they have a huge machine that needed. It's getting old and it needed replacing. And so the way a machine is usually replaced inside a factory is somebody in procurement back in the back office somewhere.

Puts together a spec sheet, puts together a budget, and goes out on the market and buys a machine. That's usually how it's done. That's not how they did it at Barry Wehmiller, because it didn't make sense to them why you would ask an accountant to buy a machine. So they went to the two guys who work on the machine. One of them had worked on it for about 25 years. The other one had a high school equivalency degree, didn't even have a high school degree. And they said to the two guys, we need to replace your machine. You have a budget of $750,000. Go buy a machine. And the guys went out on the open market and they looked at new machines. They looked at secondhand machines and the sellers said they've never had the experience. Usually people show up with a tie and a clipboard. They've never had people show up in overalls and climb into the machine before. They've never had that happen. The guys ended up spending $650,000 on a new machine.

We're proud that they saved the company $100,000. And by the way, that machine will never break because it's their machine.

But most companies wouldn't trust somebody with a high school equivalency degree to spend three quarters of a million dollars. But they are the best qualified people. My point is, go to the people who are affected by the challenge and ask them to solve the problem and just give them the safe space to do it. And if there's a budget required, give them a budget because they will solve and problem. So that's a big one.

What was the second part? The first part was Age of One. Oh, AI. Right, right. So AI is an interesting one. Right. And we can get into the goods and the bads of AI, But I'll just answer the question, which is a first for me, by the way. Usually I go down the rabbit hole. That's a joke, by the way. Feel free to laugh anytime.

I think it's a very simple thing, which is fear is the thing we're guarding against. People are afraid of AI. Right. And it's not that it's going to take away our jobs. It's that I don't know what's going to happen to me. The fear isn't losing the job. The fear is what's next. And so if we think back.

30 years ago, something like 80% of the jobs that exist today didn't exist prior to the Internet. IT consulting was not a robust business where now it's standard.

And so the narrative isn't your job is going to go away. The narrative is your job is going to change. And I'll give one example. I'll give me. In my world, the writer is king and the editor is disposal.

What AI can do is write a bad first draft.

Unless it's an original idea. So let's talk about a press release. We pay a PR person a lot of money because they know how to write a press release. That's the hard part. And then the rest of us get our grubby hands on it. That'll change. That'll change. Because now ChatGPT can write a bad first draft of a press release, but the editor is going to be the hero. And so we're going to replace writers with editors. And so to use that example that the job's not going away, the balance will shut. I'll give you another example. In the United States, the irs, a bunch of years ago, digitized taxes. It used to be, you send in the form and teams and teams and teams of accountants read through our tax forms, and they replaced it all with computers. And. And they offered this massive savings. You know how much the government actually saved when we digitized taxes?

Zero. Because, yes, they got rid of all the accountants, but then they had to boost up the IT departments because now all the computers were playing reading the taxes. The net savings was zero. The jobs changed. They didn't go away. They just changed. The net savings will be zero. You're going to have to pay editors more. You're going to have to pay what you used to pay writers.

And so if we help people understand opportunity from this to that.

You can major already in. What do they call it? In a prompter. Right.

That. That's going to become a skill, how to prompt AI. So I think we just, instead of talking about your job is going away, which is a narrative, we start talking about the new jobs that are going to be available.

I think that gets people excited because again, they're not afraid of losing their jobs. They're afraid that there's no job for them. And so we start talking about all the new jobs that are going to exist, like prompt editor, all of these things that are going to happen.

I think that people will be excited to explore new, and they can still have nerves, but they won't be the uncertainty that freaks them out. So all we have to do is paint a picture of a little more certainty than we have now.

Thank you.

Thanks. And I would. I mean, I'm going to just throw this out there, Simon, you can totally disagree with me, but I would offer that being a leader is one of.

Those jobs that stay, which is the ability to 100%. I think that the ability. Because computers will replace a lot of the mundane stuff, but the job of leading people can never, ever, ever be replaced by a computer. And so I think the need for leaders, the education for leaders, the curriculum for leaders, is going to become more important in a highly digitized world. Amen.

Amen. Awesome.

Simon. It was an absolute joy. I mean, I flew back early because I just. I couldn't. I just really wanted to be here and to meet you in person. We do close a lot of programs. Some of you have been to recent programs where we close with clips of Simon. So really, really appreciate your time and making the time to join us. And I think that what I take away here is really the call to action to all of us to continue with the movement because that's how it becomes scalable. So really, thank you so much for joining us. Enjoy Singapore. I'm sure that there are lots of different situations, suggestions here what to do. He will be here for the weekend having a lot of fun, but I'm going to ask you to do one thing which is take a photo with all of us. Okay. So Spandina is going to take lead.

Yeah.

If everyone's just sitting down, that's great.

Okay.