Simon Sinek argues there is a substantial deficit of good leadership across politics and business, rooted in a shift since the mid-to-late 1970s toward shareholder supremacy (crediting Milton Friedman) and amplified in the 1980s–90s by leaders like Jack Welch. He links this shift to rising organizational selfishness—prioritizing shareholders, short-term profit, mass layoffs, and Greed-Is-Good cultural signals—which has produced leaders socialized in those values. Sinek says it will take decades to unwind but sees emerging rejection of that model and growing interest in trust-based, cooperative leadership.
I think there's a huge vacuum. I think there's a. There's a distinct lack of leadership, good leadership in the world today, in politics and in corporate.
And it's not a sudden thing. It's been a steady drumbeat. It's been a. We've been moving in this direction for quite so many years. Amazingly, you can actually, you can trace it back to the sort of mid to late 1970s, where it's where it first started. The seed was planted. There was a. An economist by the name of Milton Friedman who theorized, he proposed a theory of the responsibility of business, that the responsibility of business was to maximize profit. That was it. That a business only existed to make money. That was a new idea and a new theory. And that a business had a responsibility primarily to its owners, that is the shareholders. And so we started to see the rise of this new concept of shareholder supremacy, which means we prioritize the wants, needs and desires of an external constituency over a customer and employee, which is the exact same idea as a coach trying to build a good team by trying to appease the fans while ignoring the players. That is the exact thing. But for whatever reason, whatever, you know, we can, we can. It's a, It's a deeper discussion to go into whatever the cultural things that were going on at the time that made this theory very appealing. And leaders started to experiment with these ideas. So, for example, we saw the rise of shareholder supremacy. It did not exist prior to the 80s and 90s. It was popularized in the 80s and 90s by leaders like Jack Welch from General Electric and those like him. The use of mass layoffs to balance the books did not exist prior to the 1980s. And you had these boom years of the 80s and 90s where it was kind of, let's be honest, much easier to make money. And so we became a very selfish society where money became the thing, greed is good, Gordon Gekko, all of these things. And we saw this steady drumbeat of the rise of selfishness. Well, as you see a rise of selfishness over the course of time, those same people are going to make their way into leadership positions as they get older and get promoted. And before you know it, we have our governments, our politics, our corporations, all of these things now filled with people who were raised on this very finite, selfish minded kind of leadership. And that's where we find ourselves today. You know, it's embarrassing that I have a career. I talk about trust and cooperation. There should be no demand for my work. But the fact that there is demand for my work means that people recognize that the environments in which they're working are uncomfortable. And we want change. We want something different.
And we are starting to speak out, and there is a sea change. And I think it took us 30 years to get to where we are now. It's going to take us 20 or 30 years to unwind it. So I. I still think we have some time to go. But the good news is we're marching in the right direction. We're talking about good leadership. We're starting to reject leadership of the past. We no longer admire Jack Welch. He's fallen off his pedestal. These are all good steps in the right direction.
