Transcript excerpt of Simon Sinek discussing organizational approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Sinek argues DEI must be treated as an ongoing, long-term process—not a finite goal or performative short-term gestures—and ties this to the national conversation following George Floyd’s murder, emphasizing the need for consistent, difficult work and self-improvement.
When we treat DEI like a finite goal, which I think unfortunately too many companies are.
And.
Here'S the uncomfortable reality of all of this stuff, right? Which is to truly make improvement and fix things, or at least improve things.
It's a steady, sometimes slow process. It's like rebuilding trust in a relationship. It doesn't happen with one bouquet of flowers and a really nicely written card. Even if it's really heartfelt and important and necessary. It's consistency and ongoing, right? But at the same time we need to see gestures so that we can see. Remember, we love a metric. We love to see that something's happening, but we see it all over the place. We see it in police reform, we see it in dei. We see a lot of companies and communities doing the short term stuff for show that may or may not be having the impact they need to have. I'm okay with the short term stuff for show so long as the difficult slow work is happening behind the scenes simultaneously, right? And so, and great companies, as we said, like good people. They. And by the way, there's no competitors in the Infinite game because you can't beat anybody. There's only other players, right? The only true competitor is yourself. How do we become a better version of ourself today than we were yesterday? And so all of these things, you know, George Floyd, the murder of George Floyd forced our nation to hold a mirror up to ourselves. And just to go as an aside, you know, after Floyd was murdered, I called some of my African American friends and I needed advice how to have difficult conversations. I needed, I wanted to hear how they were, you know, and on some of the conversations I was crying and I asked them, there's something happened with all of them. I said, I'm crying. How come you're not crying? And they said, because I'm exhausted. They said, this is new for you. This is not new for me. They said, I lived this life. You're just seeing it for the first time because the whole scene was captured. We've been talking about this, but usually you just see the dead body in the street and we don't see what led up to it. What made George Floyd important was the camera that we got to see it. And for people who haven't seen that.
For all the reasons it was shocking good, you know, and so I think that when we talk about the Infinite Gaming, constant improvement, you know.
Blaming someone for something they didn't see isn't helpful. But now that they've seen it, we say, okay, let's do that work. And let's go through the constant improvement, like what are the things that we can do inside our company? So this is not for show and temporary and fashionable, but this becomes part of our part of our part of our growth, part of who we are, that we become more aware of these things. We have systems in place. We have different kinds of metrics. We have different kinds of incentives. We have different kinds of practices. We've implemented things like listening skills. We've implemented things like teaching anybody who gets promoted to any position of leadership to learn how to have a difficult conversation. And the reality is, if you can have a difficult conversation about race, you can have a difficult conversation about anything. Your performance is not doing so great. That's a difficult conversation. So I think this is a massive opportunity, like any learning opportunity, for personal growth. And companies go through personal growth like people go through personal growth.
