Unlocking Leadership with Simon Sinek: The Infinite Mindset | Full Conversation

Simon, thank you for joining us today. And we're gonna have a kind of an informal conversation and might even have some time for some questions from the audience. So can you. Can you share your origin story? What's your hero origin story? How did you come to be this expert on leadership?

So I'm not an expert on leadership.

An authority.

Let's start there. I don't think anybody's an expert in anything. I'm a student of leadership, still got lots of learning. I still got a lot to learn. And still learning my origin story is not dissimilar, I think, to a lot of people, to our careers, which was an accident. I didn't expect to be doing anything that I'm doing. It started out of pain. I had a small business, and many of the people in this room will know the statistics in the United States, which is the over 90%, well into the 90th percentile of small businesses will fail in the first three years. Well, I survived three years, which means I had now joined a very small, elite group in America called an entrepreneur. And my fourth year in business was awful. For some reason, I'd lost the passion. And I was very embarrassed by this because superficially, everything looked good, and yet I didn't want to wake up and go to work anymore. And so all of my energy went into pretending that I was happier, more successful, and more in control than I felt. Which, if you've ever been in a dark place, pretending that you're happy makes you even go even darker. And it wasn't until a dear friend of mine came to me and said, something's wrong. Something's different, did I come completely clean. Lifted this huge weight off my shoulders. And now all that energy that I went to lying, hiding, and faking could now go into finding a solution. And the solution that I found was this thing called the why. I knew what I did. I knew how I did it, but I didn't know why. I became obsessed with this thing called the why. I learned my why, but more important, I learned to help others find theirs. And I would help my friends, and they would find renewed passion in their work. They would sometimes take entrepreneurial ventures themselves. And people just kept inviting me, and I just kept saying yes. And the rest, as they say, is history.

It is. So we, most of us out here are chiropractors, and 70% of all chiropractors are small business owners. And But 100% of all doctors and healers are leaders. So. And we also, throughout this whole weekend, we've carefully Selected courses on leadership and strategy and how to improve our serve. But we also have technical classes. But we want to make sure that we get this out here so we empower people to become better leaders. Now, Damon John's been one of our speakers here and he's asked, usually ask us, and whenever he gets here, he asked me for a two to five word declaration of who you are. Like, what sets you apart, what's your driving passion? Do you have a two to five word statement of your purpose?

Of course. I mean, I wake up every single morning to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. So together, each of us can change our world for the better. And I live my life with a very clear vision as well. I imagine a world. You said a little bit of it up front. I imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are, and end the day fulfilled by the work that they do. And I've committed my career and my life to advancing towards that vision.

So what do most of us get wrong in leadership?

When you say, what do most people get wrong in leadership? I think leadership is a misunderstood skill set. 1. First of all, it absolutely is a skill set. There's no such thing as a natural born leader. Even the leaders that appear to have natural capacity, I guarantee they learned it when they were younger. They had a mentor, a parent, a coach, a guardian, somebody that helped them learn these skills.

Number one, leadership is nothing about being in charge. It's the awesome responsibility to see those around us rise. It's about taking care of those in our charge. The closest analogy I can give to being a great leader is like being a great parent. Yes, I know you don't get to pick your team sometimes, but you don't get to pick your children either. And yet you show up with love every day and you work tirelessly to see that they will gain the skills and the confidence to do well and excel in their lives. And great leaders are doing exactly the same thing. And leadership is all about human skills. And leaders who become great leaders, it's because they study leadership, they're obsessed with it. They read books about it, they watch talks about it, they read articles about it. And when you go out with them, all they want to do is talk about it. They're obsessed with the concept. Just like parents. There's no such thing as an expert parent, but you read articles, you read books, you talk to other parents, and you solve problems along the way.

So in your book the Infinite game, you call CEOs really. CVs, chief visionary officers. So you're not there to be the boss as much as you are to share a vision. Expand upon that.

Well, I think it's. I think the concept of CEO is hilarious because if you look at all the other C level titles, we know exactly what the job responsibility is in the title. The cmo, we know exactly what they do. The cfo, the cto. It says it right there.

Yes.

If you can't read a P and L, I'm not making you the cfo. I don't need to look at your job experience.

What the heck is a CEO? What's an executive officer? It doesn't tell us what the responsibility of that human being is. And so you get a lot of people in that position who aren't necessarily qualified for that job. I prefer the term cvo Chief Vision Officer, Someone who is the keeper and holder of where we are going, of that idealized vision that we are striving towards.

If you just have somebody who's obsessed with finance in the CEO position, what you'll find is that that organization becomes much more finite minded, much more short term focused. I want somebody long term looking beyond horizons.

Certainly when I've stumbled into mistakes along the way, it's when I've failed to be the provide the vision and try to be the boss.

Yeah.

So your book, the Infinite Game. I love it. What is the infinite game and what is a finite game and what game are we playing?

So in the mid-1980s, a philosopher and theologian by the name of Dr. James Kars defined these two types of games, finite games and infinite games. A finite game is defined as.

Check, check. There we go. A finite game is defined as known players, fixed rules, and an agreed upon objective. Agreed upon objective. Football, baseball. Right. If there's a winner necessarily, they have to be losers. But more important, there's always a beginning, a middle and an end. And then you have infinite games. Infinite games are defined as known and unknown players, which means you don't necessarily know who all the other players are. And new players can join whenever they want. The rules are changeable, which means every player can play however they want. And the objective is to stay in the game as long as possible to perpetuate the game. We are players in infinite games every day of our lives, whether we know it or not. No one in here will ever win healthcare. No one will ever win education.

No one will ever be declared the winner of your marriage.

If you want to be number one in your marriage, good luck.

With that, that's for sure.

You can be number two, but you can't be number one. And there's definitely no such thing as winning business. And yet when we listen to the language of so many people in business, it becomes very, very clear. They don't know the game they're playing. They talk about being number one or being the best or beating their competition based on what. Based on what agreed upon metrics, time frames and objectives. And this is a problem, but because when we play with a finite mindset in an infinite game, when we play to win in a game that has no finish line, there are some very predictable and consistent outcomes. The big ones are the decline of trust, the decline of cooperation, and the decline of innovation. Like when Circuit City went bankrupt, Best Buy didn't win anything. Right. And so we have to play for the game that we're in. And if you're in business to stay in business versus if you want to just hit some target and get out of it and you don't actually care if the business does good work, then you have to play for the mindset you're for the game you're playing.

So as a profession, we're in an infinite game. We want to perpetuate. True, we only have an impact as long as we survive. Parker Seminars. We only have an impact which has been 73 years, as long as we survive. And. But if. If someone built a practice and they sold it, the goal was to raise it, build up a series of clinics, and then sell it.

Yeah.

That's a finite game.

Well, so let's. The. The infinite game is not the absence of finite games. It's the context within which those finite games exist.

Right.

So let me give you a better analogy. We overuse sports analogies in business. Sports is always a beginning and middle end business. Not necessarily.

Here's a better analogy. Let's say you want to be healthy. So I know there's many things you have to do. You have to exercise, you have to eat right. You have to nurse your personal relationships, get sleep. You'll never be good at all those things all the time. It's a striving. But there's nothing wrong with setting arbitrary goals. There's nothing wrong with setting quarterly or annual goals for your business. There's no problem with that. Like, I want to lose X amount of weight by X date. Great. You do all the things you're supposed to do. You stand on the scale every day. We love a metric. Human beings need metrics. You can't run a marathon without mile markers. Right. It's actually unnerving. So we like to measure things because it tells us speed and distance. And sometimes it goes well and sometimes it goes badly. And let's say you hit your goal by the right date on the right time, ecstatic. But here's the problem. You have to keep doing it for the rest of your life. The game's not over. But what I think is more interesting is what happens if you miss your goal? What happens if you don't lose the weight on the right day, on the right time? Well, the answer is nothing. Nothing happens. Nothing happens. In fact, you're way healthier now than when you started because you've been doing all the right things. You just got the date wrong. And we do the same thing in business, right? You can pick an arbitrary number to hit, usually at the end of the year, because that's when we pay taxes. And you can strive towards that. And if you're doing the right thing and building a healthy business, if you hit your goal, great. Be ecstatic, but keep working at it. But if you miss your goal, the question is, what's the trend? And I think we need to pay more attention to not only if we hit the goal, but how we hit the goal. Did you do it ethically, or did you do it by stabbing people in the back, cutting corners, you know, cutting quality to drive margin? That will help you hit a few goals, but over the long run, you're going to do damage to the business, or are you building in a healthy way? You just got the wrong date and you got the wrong time. You're striving to build a healthy business. And so if you. If somebody's working to build that business, are you going to sell a business that's healthy and somebody else can continue to run and that business will continue to do good in the world? Or do you just want to cash out and make your money and you'll put lipstick on the pig and you don't care if you're just trying to put lipstick on the pig. That's a finite mindset. And I don't know what you've built, but I guarantee you it'll be worth less than if you built a really healthy business that someone can take along and nurse once you're gone. In other words, infinite mindset still counts.

All right, well, as I said, most of us out here, we're all leaders. Whether you have your own business or if you're a provider or if you're leading students, what advice would you provide these Doctors and their staff and their families for creating a culture of excellence, changing the culture to reflect a healthy culture where people are valued and that they're, they feel valued and they were able to get things done in a, in a more efficient way.

So one of the big mistakes we make, especially if we're leading a practice, we see this in healthcare a lot, which is if you ask the leaders what's your priority, they always say the patient. That's not true. The leader is responsible for the people. The people are responsible for the patients. And if the people feel taken care of, guess what they will do? They will exert their energy to take care of the patients. If the people don't feel safe, they don't feel psychologically safe when they come to work. If they don't feel seen or heard or understood by their leaders, then they will take actions to protect themselves from their leaders, which takes care away from the patients. So it is a human enterprise first and foremost. And if you take care of the people internally, they will take care of the business, they will take greater pride, they will look for ways to save money, et cetera, et cetera. I'll give you a real life example. So I had a conversation with the food and beverage director at one of the Four Seasons hotels. Four Seasons is an extremely well led organization that understands that you take care of your people and your people take care of your customer. And they were telling me that.

That when they gave authority to their front line to decide like if they screw something up, like do you comp a drink or comp a dessert or comp a meal, something strange happened, which is they found the frontline staff were stingier than the managers because they were so protective of the business. Right. So they're not just giving away everything willy nilly. But that's only when the people feel like they matter and feel like they're a part of the business, they'll treat it like their own.

That's great. So we as chiropractors know our why. To improve human health, performance and well being. What advice would you give to us to expand our message? How do we, how can we get our message out in a way that would attract people to our practice?

Individually or as an industry?

Let's do them both.

So individually, every single human being in here has their own personal why. And if you have passion for your work, then the odds are very high that your work is helping you advance your own cause, your own personal why. Right. So the question is, what's your why? Like I didn't Wake up. I didn't. This is. I'm not living my childhood dream here. I didn't want to be a public speaker or an author. I don't think any child wanted to be a writer. I wasn't that kind of nerdy kid, you know?

What kind of nerdy kid were you?

Oh, I like science fiction. I went to space camp.

My sister makes fun of me because I went to space camp when I was 13. And when I came back, I wore my flight suit to school and everybody made fun of me, but I knew they were just jealous. So it's okay.

I mean, I had wings, I had my name patch, you know, American flag on the shoulder. Yeah, but the point is, I don't think anybody here was, was doing chiropractic work on your teddy bears, Right? Like, this is not your childhood dream. Sometimes you fell into it by accident or sometimes you discovered it along the way. So the question is, what's your why? And how does this help you bring your why to life? So if you want, there are many ways to find your why. I've written about it, I've spoken about it. But here's a fun way you can do it, right? It's called the friends exercise. Call a friend or sit down with a friend. Who? One of your best friends, the kind of person you love. They love you. You would be there for them at 3 o' clock in the morning if they needed you. And you know that they would be there for you at 3 o' clock in the morning if you needed them. Do not do this with a spouse. Do not do this with a sibling. Do not do this with a parent. Those relationships are too close. Do it with a best friend. And ask them the simple question, why are we friends? And they're going to look at you like you're insane. Because the part of the brain that controls our feelings, our limbic brains like trust and loyalty and love, doesn't control language. And so that's why it's hard to put our emotions into words. And so they won't be able to answer the question. So you stop asking why. You say, come on, what specifically is it about me that I know that you'd be there for me no matter what? And they're going to struggle to answer the question. And so they'll start saying things like, I don't know.

You'Re a good person, I trust you. You've always been there for me. And you play devil's advocate, you go, great. That's the definition of a friend. What specifically is it about me that I know you'd be there for me no matter what. And again, they're going to go through a few rounds of this. Don't help them. Don't let anybody else help them. It's frustrating. And eventually they'll give up. And eventually they'll stop trying to describe you and they'll start describing themselves. And this is what my friend said to me. They said, simon, I don't know. All I know is that I can just sit in a room with you. I don't even have to talk to you. And I feel inspired. And I got goosebumps. And that's what will happen to you, which is they will say something that will tap you emotionally. You'll well up with tears, you'll get goosebumps. Something will happen. And that's when you know that the value you have in the world, your why is the thing that they value from you most. And so you'll get in the ballpark. And then your ability to put that into words, your ability to talk about what you believe, not what you do, is the thing that inspires people to want to come and visit your practice over another practice. So for me, for example, if I were a chiropractor, or maybe I fell into this field and didn't follow the path that I did, but my why would be the same. I would say something like every single day, I am driven to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. And that's one of the things that I love, not like, love, emotional word about being a chiropractor. I know that people struggle when they're in pain. I know people aren't at their best selves when they don't have total mobility. And what I have found is by simply giving people the freedom to move the way that they, that they want to move, they can go off and do the things that they've dreamed about doing. And I'm actually fulfilling my life's purpose purpose by doing it.

Right.

That's very good.

Well said. We've got 500 students here. And I always tell my students when they come to Parker seminars, go talk to the chiropractors in the field. Go talk to them. Ask them if they like what they do. Ask them about their passion. And you all are the best recruiters I have for, for our university. It's the passion in helping people, but getting the message out. And then why do my patients come here? Will they trust you? You have care. And if you're struggling with patients, it might be that you need to evaluate some of your behaviors and make sure that you, I don't know, meditate, be more mindful with people. Is there a way to. You don't want to contrive who you are for business purposes. You're asking people to be authentically authentic people.

At the end of the day, it's a human enterprise, right? Which is you'll get clients that'll come and go for whatever reason, but the ones who are loyal, the ones who recommend you to others, it's because they like you. Can they find somebody who does about the same work as you? About the same quality, about the same price? Yes, to some degree. There's a commoditization of the skill set. You know, is someone slightly better at some things than others? Yes, of course. But they come back for you. Do you make them feel seen and heard and understood? Do you have listening skills? Right. If somebody comes in grumpy, are you just telling them to cheer up, or do you have the skill set to meet them where they are? Right. And the more that people can feel like you care about them like a human being, that you're not just going through the motions of doing the things that you've been taught and that you're qualified to do, the more they'll want to come back. You know, it's the same when we go shopping or go to a restaurant, right? We give big tips when somebody makes us feel like we matter. We give small tips when people don't make us feel like we matter, regardless of the actual quality of the service, you know, whether something came out on time or not. And so I think everybody has to remember you're interacting with human beings. You, more than anybody else, can't do your work online. It is a human enterprise. And the better you are at human skills, the more you will command love and loyalty and recommendations from those who come to see you.

So as we. As we're growing in this manner, and you and I talked about the e Myth when we were behind stage, Is that something that might be a barrier to a chiropractor to grow? The e. Myth is.

Maybe you can explain what the e. Myth is and how what having relying too much on me being the person, the front person, would if interfere with us growing our practice?

Well, I'll tell you, me personally, it was the single biggest barrier to my own company's success, to my own. My own personal growth, which is I had to be in every meeting and make every decision. I was the chief cook and bottle washer, and I had employees. But I Empowered. Nobody. And I had to have all the new business. I was the most qualified. Right? I mean, it's a highly stressful situation.

And nothing gets done without me. It's just not scalable. You can have a job that way. And this is what the E Myth. Michael Gerber's book, the E. Myth. He talks about this entrepreneurial myth. The number of people who start a business, they work harder and make less money than if they just had a job. Like, what's the appeal? Well, I want to be my own boss. I get that. But you're making less money and working harder. Why don't you just go get a job? There has to be a real reason. And the single biggest lesson that I learned, that was a profound shift, not only in my business, but in.

My own person, my own confidence, was when I learned to say, I don't know and I need help. Those are the two single biggest things. And to accept it when it was offered. The amount of times people offer us help, but we turn it down because we feel embarrassed or we don't want to bother them, or we don't want them to think that we're struggling. And by the way, this degree of vulnerability, saying, I don't know, I don't understand. A lot of people are. First of all, the word vulnerable scares them. Nobody wants to admit weakness.

Now.

You don't have to be insecure when you admit vulnerability. You can own it with confidence. I'll give an example. Yeah, I love. I love being a chiropractor, but I gotta be honest with you, I'm no good at the numbers. I find that really hard and it's killing my practice. And I really need help. Okay. Not confidence inspiring. Right. Versus. I love being a chiropractor. My absolute favorite thing, what I suck at is the numbers. And what I really need help with is just somebody to show me how to run a P and L, and then I know that this thing will thrive. It's the same thing. One you own it and one, you're embarrassed by it. Just own all the weaknesses, own all the things you suck at and ask for help.

I can relate to that totally. At college, I'm not an academician, so I come here. I have world authority on that. I hired. So then they run it better than I could ever run it. We've even hired a vice president of culture strategy. Someone to help us is so valuable that our goal is to have our culture be a competitive advantage.

Love.

How are organizations getting it right with culture? How big organizations getting it wrong?

You can either have a culture by default or by design. And most people think about cultures. Most business leaders think about culture usually after something bad happens or when they're struggling with something or they, They're. They're. They're hiring, but nothing seems to work out. Ask yourself what kind of culture you want, and it's going to be based on your. Why. I wanted my culture to be a place that is inspiring to come and work at my. At my company, and, and that we want to do work that inspires other people. That's. That's why I get out of bed in the morning, right? And again it goes. It's like. It's like parenting. No one will ever. You'll never be an expert at this. It's 1% better every day. I'll give you one example. So most of us give feedback the way we like to get it, or we take the advice from people on stages like this, you know, given, you know, a compliment sandwich. You know, tell them the good, then tell them the bad, then tell me. Tell them the good. Don't ever give me a compliment sandwich, okay? I hate them because you tell me some bullshit at the beginning, then you tell me the real thing, and then you tell me some bullshit at the end, and I'm supposed to receive it better that way, right? But the problem is I like blunt feedback, so I tend to give blunt feedback. Turns out not everybody likes blunt feedback.

So I had a team member, a colleague that I worked with, that I would give her blunt feedback in the moment because, heck, that's how I like to get it. And I tell you, sometimes screaming matches ensued, right? Like we would have screaming matches over me giving her feedback. And at one point, I'm realizing it's going nowhere, and I interrupt, I go, this is not working clearly. Can you please tell me how to give you feedback? Because clearly I'm failing. And she said, yes, I just need to be prepared. So ask me, can I give you some feedback or something? Schedule a time with me and tell me it's going to be a feedback session and I can put it in my calendar. I said, I can do that. So I started scheduling it. Or I started saying, can I give you some difficult feedback now? And she would say, yes. And I could be completely blunt. And she could take harsher feedback than almost anybody on the team, so long as I prepared her for it. And so we have to learn how to give and receive feedback, things like that. The point is there are these skills, listening skills, how to have difficult conversations. This is A skill of good culture. I saw this happen after the murder of George Floyd.

Right.

The number of leaders after George Floyd. You know what they did with their teams? Nothing. They did nothing. Not because they're bad people. It's because they were so afraid of talking to their team about race that they would accidentally trigger someone or inflame the situation that they opted to do nothing. This is because they lacked the skill set of how to have a difficult conversation. Let me teach you how to have a difficult conversation. I need to have a difficult conversation with you. I'm worried I'm going to get some of this wrong, but I need you to work with me. I may say things wrong, I may accidentally trigger somebody, but having this conversation right now is more important than me getting it perfectly right. Can we have that conversation? And now you've just enrolled people to say we're going to have a difficult conversation together and we're not all going to get it right. And by the way, if you can learn the skill of how to have a conversation about race, for example, you can have a conversation about pretty much anything, performance or anything else that's going on in your team.

That reminds me of what happened in the last presidential election year. That's when George Floyd was murdered. That's when so many. We had cities that are on fire, divisiveness. At Park University, we had those conversations. But for the most part, we're doctors in wartime. If someone sees Dr. Rosenbaum, they brought an enemy of combatant into his operating room, he would treat them with the same respect.

And care as if it was one of his marines.

We're outside of the conflict. We need to be, as doctors, separate from the conflict and be the healers. And we're there to be the calming force. It's going to happen this year. It's going to be a contentious time. And I just challenge you guys, be the light in the world that we're going to see in the next five months.

So we hear a lot about hiring the right people and not micromanaging them. But you talked about people coming, coming into the workforce unprepared, possibly. And so how should we work with these people to maximize their contributions?

So again, we're there to see those around us rise. That's what leadership is. So if you want people to be honest about their shortcomings so that you can help them train up, we have to be honest about ours. Right. About our shortcomings. One of the greatest things that I ever did was, was open up to my team about the Things I'm struggling with, the days that I'm having a hard day. If I'm in a bad place, I ask my team to be patient with me. And it turns out the more risks that I took to be open, the more risks my team took to be open to me. So if I talked about a skill set I didn't have or where. Where I suck, then they told me where. Where they suck, and I could be there to support them. And more important, they see me doing it for others. So are we yelling at people when they get things wrong? Are we saying, all right, try again? Like, how are we responding when things go wrong? I remember I had a boss named Peter Intimaggio. He was the best boss I ever had in my life. Annoyingly, he would never answer a single question.

Sorry.

He would never answer a single question. I'd ask him something and he'd say, well, what do you think we should do? I'd be like, I think we should do this. He goes, well, why didn't you try that? And.

If I screwed something up, he expected us to be fully accountable. He expected us to walk into his office and say, I screwed up. And you never got yelled at. He said, okay, so what are you going to do to fix it? And because we didn't get yelled at, we were encouraged to be honest, and we were rewarded for being honest. In other words, he held space for us. He was supportive in us trying to fix something. We never feared for losing our jobs if we screwed something up. And I screwed some big things up, but he was just there to support us. And so the more that we felt that, the more, not only risks were we willing to take, which is good, but the more we took full accountability. So sometimes I think we have young people come into our practices or come into our companies, and we expect them to be us, or we expect them to have been raised the same way we were raised. They were raised differently. It's a different time. It's a different generation. It's not better or worse. It's just different. And so a little bit of empathy and a little bit of support goes a long way.

And if we hire someone who's just like us, one of us is not needed.

That too.

Yeah. And something that is common in chiropractic is chiropractors become successful. Their patients are coming in. It's time to hire an associate, to hire the associate. Patient starts seeing the associate, and then some of the patients prefer the associate, and the doctor gets jealous. And so, again, they're freeing you up, and they're actually jealous of their associ. I've seen people eventually fire the associate because they feel they're competing against them as they're making them more money.

I mean, that's. You know, that sounds like a dream scenario to hire people who are better than you. That means you can stop working and people will love coming to your practice.

And you can make money when you're lying on a beach. Like.

Why wouldn't you want that?

That's the e H. That's.

But. But you're right. I mean, ego's a thing. And. And, you know, we want to be loved and we want to be the star, and that's the mistake I made. Remember when I was. When I was the boss and I had to learn to say, I don't know, or there are other people better than me or smarter than me. That's the dream and to own it. Remember, it's your practice. And the more that you create an environment where they feel loved and they feel like they're growing, that you're teaching them skills, not just technical skills, but human skills, that they will leave better versions of themselves because they work for you. You're in a new job. Your job is not to be the world's best chiropractor anymore. Your job is not to be the world's best leader. So start studying that.

That's it. That's wonderful. Now, I know you have strong opinions about certain leadership styles. Like Jack Welch, who would fire the 10% of his bottom performers every year and then expect the other 90% to be loyal and happy. Yeah. What can insight can you do for us to bolster and reinforce our spirit of loyalty with those who work with us and belonging and security?

Oh, boy. You went right for the Pandora's box.

Yeah.

Yeah. 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're 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 wanted 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.

So how can leaders apply your golden circle concept to inspire their teams and organizations?

So the two things I would offer that really profoundly help in an organization, and they're both religion for me. And it changed the course of my life, changed the course of my business. Number one, I learned to start with why, right? So I gave you the example before. I didn't tell people what I do. I tell people what I believe, right? So when you're flying home, on the flight after this event, you'll probably sit next to somebody on a plane and you have plane conversations where somebody turns and goes, what do you do? And you go, I'm a chiropractor. And they go, cool. And except for the 10% of people who want to talk to a chiropractor, that conversation is over because nobody cares about what you do. And by the way, if you said, what do you do? And they go, I'm in marketing. They go, you're gonna go, cool.

So the two things I did, number one, I stopped talking about what I did, and I only started talking about what I believed. Right? You heard the hypothetical example I gave a moment ago. You say, I love what I do every single day. I help people find ways to live a more inspiring life. Oh, my God. How do you do that? Believe it or not, I'm a chiropractor and I. And then you can talk about you for the next, you know, two hours if you want. Right? So number one was I learned to start with why. I learned to start with what I believe, not what I did. The second thing is the law of diffusion of innovations. It became a religion for me, right, really, really quickly. Law of diffusion of innovations. All populations Sift across the standard deviation, the bell curve. If you have high performers, you have low performers, you have an average, always, right? Like, I know in this room there's a percentage of people who are just nodding their head going, oh, I love Simon. I know there's a percentage of people in this room who go, he's an idiot.

Right?

And then I know there's an average who are kind of open minded, right? I know that coming in. So the law of diffusion tells us that the first two and a half percent of any population are your innovators. These your big idea people. Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, right? Then you have your early adopters. These are the people with a higher risk tolerance. They're willing to try something new, be a part of something that reflects their own beliefs. They're willing to spend more money, make more effort, travel further to see you go out of their way because somehow you reflect their beliefs. Then you have the early and late majority, more cynical, more practical. What's in it for me? Will I get my money back if it doesn't work out? Right? And then your laggards, the only reason they partake in anything, because you have no choice. They have no choice anymore. Clearly, we all want mass market success or mass market acceptance of an idea. In other words, we all want the bell. And usually what we do is we, we throw all of our efforts at the bell, right? Which is why we have promotions and sales and guarantees. We're talking to people with low risk tolerance. And what I learned is that in the, with the law defusion, if you can get 18 to 15 to 18% market penetration, there's a social phenomenon that happens called a tipping point. And it just goes. If you ignore what I'm telling you, you'll always get about 10%. I guarantee you 10% of your patients, they love you. You love them rather. Oh, I love them. They get it right. That's not enough to make the system tip. And so I got extremely good at figuring out who was an early adopter and who wasn't. So people would call me up and they'd say, I heard about you. Convince me why I should hire you, not an early adopter. So I would say, don't. And this is at a time where I needed every dollar. I was living paycheck to paycheck. I had no money in the bank, and I would turn down business with people who were the wrong fits. I'll get you later. The people I said yes to were the ones who believed what I believed. Because I started with why. And they would say things to me like, you're onto something. I don't think it's perfect, but you're doing something. And I really like it. I'd say yes to those. And they did more to build my practice than I could because they believed what I believed, that they would tell more people about me and my work than anybody else. And so my work spread with $0 in marketing because I started to get really good at working with people who believed what I believed. And they told their friends.

That's great. I remember when I was in practice, I, I was going through my notes one day and I'd seen all these referrals from this patient. I couldn't remember who this patient was. And then I got his charred out looked at it. It was, I remember the visit. I walked in the office, he's all, his body language was all scrunched up. And I asked, can I help you? My wife wants me to come here and. What's your wife wants you to do? She. And he, I don't know if I believe in this stuff. So I, I did my examination and I told him, you know, I don't think I can help help you. No charge for today. He went out and I, years later, he's my number one referral source. A patient I never even treated. And it's don't chase after money. Don't chase after the wrong patients. There's certain people that are not going to get it.

And don't be finite minded. Learn from lawyers. Right? A lawyer charges you for your first time consultation.

Yes.

Right. So right off the bat you hate them, right? Because they haven't done anything yet. They're charging you for you to discover that you don't want to work with them. Right?

So we're not using that as practice management. By the way, he's giving away free care. So in your opinion, what's the most common challenges that leaders face when trying to inspire our team? So you call us visionary officers, but how can we inspire them? Because you don't want to just like get in front of the parade and follow me. How do you get the message out to inspire people?

Okay, so talk about inspiration again. If you start with why you're going to be more inspiring, right? It's also a recruiting tool. It's a reinforcement tool when you're in. But, but remember you're there to see your people grow. Think of them like, like, like your children, right? Find out where they're strong, encourage them and, and, and catch Them doing things right. We so often catch people doing things wrong. Right? Catch people doing things right. Reinforce the behaviors you want rather than constantly punishing the behaviors you don't want. Change your incentive structures to get the behaviors you want. I'll give you. So this happened to me very young in my career. I worked at a big ad agency early in my career, and new business pitches were usually done by the senior people. And it was Christmas time, so all the senior people went off to vacation. We had a big pitch sometime in January, and I was left back at the office because I didn't have vacation. And they told me and another junior person, prepare the war room. Which, I apologize. As a Marine, it basically means hang the research on the walls, right? Well, that took an hour, and we had a week to kill. So we decided to do the whole pitch ourselves. We did the strategy, we combed through the research, but we came up with an insight. We wrote the whole pitch deck. And the senior leaders came back, we showed them our work, and they actually used our deck in the new business pitch. And we lost the business. We did not win the pitch. And my boss gave me a huge promotion. They moved me up two levels because he wasn't rewarding my outcome. He was rewarding my initiative. And guess what? He got more of initiative. You know, this is a Marine. I learned this when I went to OCS and watched them do the lrc.

Basically, this leadership reaction court, leadership reaction course, these mini obstacle courses, right? And I stand next to the drill instructor when they have to do these things timed like, take all your men and material over the water hazard, which is what Marines call a pond.

With the planks of different wood, three of different sizes, wood, you know, and nowhere on the grading list. Nowhere on the grading list does it say if they made it to the other side or not. And I asked the drill instructor, how come you don't care if they have mission success? He says, well, we understand that good leaders sometimes suffer mission failure and bad leaders sometimes enjoy mission success. So if they succeed or fail doesn't tell us what kind of leader they are. We said, well, then how do you know what kind of leader they are? They said, if they're exhibiting the characteristics of a good leader. And so they, you know this. You get drilled into you the characteristics of what it means to be a good leader. And individual mission successes don't necessarily matter because they know, the Marines know that if you reward the good behaviors that you want to see repeated, good leaders will enjoy mission success more often over time. And that's the point. More often over time. But if we just ding people every time they fail, we're going to get nothing out of them.

So is everybody happy how we're doing this? We got a little time left. Would you prefer to have some questions for the audience or keep this conversation going? Okay, so Claire and I, we have one of our sons is in the Army Special Forces and during his training and it took him about three years to get his Green Beret and they'll put him on these horrible.

Events where they're carrying large loads and things like that and they have psychotic hidden along the way. Watching the reaction and with it is that person's letting the other people do the load. They're all, this one's collaborating and they're looking for not just leaders but people who, because you have everybody being a leader, they'll pick up the load. They also look at which ones are the load. And along the way it was really innovative how they really, it's not just about brute force. They need people to work together and that's how a team is built.

Well, I've done work with the SEALS and Dev group and it's the same for the Rangers, the same for Recon, Marine Recon. They asked a former SEAL.

What kind of person becomes a seal. So I think we can all agree that SEALS and the other special operating forces are some of the highest performing teams on the planet. Planet. Right.

So what are you agreeing with that, George?

Okay, so, so they asked the SEAL what kind of person makes it into the seals? And he said, he said the star college athletes who've, who've never really been tested to the core of their being. None of those guys make it through, he says the preening leaders who like to delegate everything, none of, none of those guys make it through, he said these guys that come in with huge, huge hulking muscles covered in tattoos because they want to prove how strong they are, none of those guys make it through, he said some of the guys who make it through are skinny and scrawny. He said some of the guys who make it through, you'll actually see them shivering out of fear, he says. But every guy that makes it through, when they're physically exhausted, when they're emotionally exhausted, somehow, some way they're able to dig down deep inside themselves to find the energy and to help the guy next to them. It's about this incredible level of care and teamwork that makes high performing teams. And what's so funny is all of the work that I do, I talk about high performing teams. And yet people try and interpret that to individuals. There's no such thing as a high performing individual. Right. Because we know what they are. They're Spotlight Rangers. There's these people who. They're the stars. Leave me alone. But when push comes to shove, they don't help anybody and nobody wants to help them. And there are so many of us that have toxic geniuses in our companies. They're so good, but they destroy the performance of everybody else because everybody hates them. And worse is when we know who they are and we say, why don't you get rid of that person? They're clearly uncoachable. And we go, I know, but their numbers are so good.

So all we're promoting. But here's the detriment. Not only are we reinforcing that that person should keep doing what they're doing, we're sending a subtle message to everybody else in our company, which is if you act like them, you'll do well at this company. When we get rid of them. Not just because they're difficult people, but they are uncoachable. They've proved themselves to be uncoachable. It sends a message to the rest of the team, which is, I don't care how good your skills are, if you don't work as a team, you don't help each other. You have no place here. And guess what? You're going to get more teamwork. And teams are always high performing than individuals anyway.

You talked about the concept of leaders eating last. And I would add to that that leaders. You quote the Marines how the leaders always eat last. Leaders also usually eat the crappiest food. In the Marines we turn the C ration boxes upside down. There'd be 12 meals and people memorize which one's which. And it's 12, 12 people in a squad. So the private picks first and boots all the way up to the platoon. Platoon commander. So they always get the crap meal. But your concept of leaders eat last. Extrapolate on that.

Well, I got it from talking to the Marine.

Yeah.

I said, what makes the Marines so good at what they do? He said, officers eat last.

They always. They take.

They always do. Yeah.

You know they're going to take care of.

And you know as well as I do that when an officer or leader puts themselves first, what they're doing, what they're going to accidentally do. This is what I said. If you can have a culture by default or by design, if you always put yourself first and you take the best of everything, then you're creating a culture, whether you know it or not, of stab each other in the back, dog eat dog and be selfish. That's what you're going to get. Because people will always follow the leader. They'll follow the example of the leader. Always. Right? Do you know in the United States, remember in the we used to wear, men used to wear hats for fashion, right? Do you know when that stopped? Know when we stopped wearing hats for fashion in the United States? When John F. Kennedy was elected because he didn't wear a hat.

Leader sets the tone. Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, normalized mass layoffs for economic reasons. We follow the leader whether we agree with them or not. Politically, we follow our leaders, right? So it's the same in your company. If you put yourself first and everybody can see that, you will create a culture of selfishness, right? I'll give you one example, right? So this is a common one, right? The phone rings, some front desk receptionist, whoever picks it up, they ask for you and your colleague says, dave's on the phone. And you go tell him, I'm not here. Congratulations. You have just condoned lying inside your company. That's what that is. That is a lie. Everybody knows it's a lie. So I had an assistant who I had a very important phone call with the senior leaders of a pretty significant organization and I forgot and I just didn't show up on the phone call. I just forgot. And so what? She, she emailed them all and said, so sorry. Simon had another call that ran long. Can we reschedule? Now I had to sit down with her and say, I'm so grateful. I know why you did that. You did that to protect my reputation. And I'm super grateful for your intention. You can never do that again because that's a lie. And we don't lie. You can say, simon missed the call. Sorry, you don't have to tell them I'm an idiot.

But you can't say that. It's because I was in another call when I wasn't. Because we don't condone lying here.

It's called integrity.

It's called integrity. And so these micro things that if you allow for them to happen in the micro, they will show up in the macro. And don't be surprised when somebody in your company starts lying. It's because you allowed it. And so in a culture, you will always get the behavior you reward and you will always get the behavior that you model. So when you choose to eat last and you set that example and you and you know this as well as anybody who's ever served, right. What ends up happening is when you run out of food, your people will all give a little bit of their food to feed their leader. You take care of your people, you eat last. Your people will always take care of you and make sure you're fed.

And I know everybody who started, that's very good.

Everyone who started to practice. When you're starting off, there's months where you don't get paid, but everybody else gets paid. All of us have been there where you're living on your credit cards, but you always take care of the team. And I will say our vice president of culture is we're very mindful of all of our employees, not just the high paid ones, but the ones we really worry about will be the ones that the lower wages. If there's something, a glitch that happens, it affects them much more than if there's a snafu where their paychecks come out late. Well, if you're a high paid executive, it will mean less to them, but your staff, it'll really be big factor to them. So being very mindful of that is important.

So what advice would you give to leaders who want to implement? Maybe they have a vision and they're met with resistance and skepticism along the way and that, what's the word? It's a resistance to change, which is so common.

My friend Bob Chapman, when he was younger.

He was having a crisis of faith.

And so he went to his priest.

And he says.

I don't think I believe in, I don't think I believe in God. And his priest said, good thing God still believes in you.

People come along at different times. Like you can't force someone to have a conversion or you can't force somebody to believe. We don't know what their story is. We don't know that maybe they've worked for horrible people in the past. Maybe they've come from companies that had terrible cultures. Maybe they've been twice, once bitten, twice shy. Like maybe they're coming with their guard up. Like, I don't know what their experience is, I don't know what their story is. So just because we are well intentioned and we're all like chipper, chipper and studying leadership that we expect that they come in in the first three weeks of their employment. How come you're not all in? Everybody else here is all in. Like you got to meet people where they are. Some people jump right in head first and they're really excited when they come into a new culture and some people are slower. Just let them come at their own pace. But you just keep doing the right thing. And most importantly, you gotta be consistent, right? You can't just do it once or twice. You gotta do it all the time. And it's the little things that add up more than the big things. So I always think the balance of intensity versus consistency. So intensity is something like this. You've come in for three days. It's an intense time. It's intense education. You're on this. And anything intense is easily measured.

And captured in time. Right? But consistency is the little stuff that is innocuous and doesn't seem to do anything like saying good morning, you know, in the hallway. Well, that does nothing if you do it once. But what if you do it every day? You know, like, how long, you know, when did your wife fall in love with you? Like, I don't know, like it wasn't because you remembered her birthday or bought her flowers on Valentine's Day. Those are intensity. It's the little things you did. Like when you went to get a drink from the fridge and you just brought one back for her, or the game was on and she said, honey, can I talk to you? And you hit pause on the game and you said, sure. What's on your mind? Right? Like little things like that, that in a vacuum do nothing. But when they add up, people fall in love. And it's the same in leadership. It's the little things. It's the brushing your teeth, not going to the dentist. You have to go to the dentist twice a year. That's intensity. But if that's all you do, your teeth fall out. So you can't just rely on the big rah rahs, the big leadership things, the big coaching things. Very important. You got to brush your teeth for two minutes in the morning and two minutes in the evening every single day. And it only works if you keep doing it. And that's what leadership is. It's the boring, mundane, daily little things. And some of it is so easy. Some of it is so easy, right? Let me show you one of the easiest things you can do. Can I borrow someone's phone? Is there a phone I can borrow?

Yeah.

Thanks. I'm going to show you something. I'll show you a little thing, right? So here I am, I'm sitting in my office, and you walk into my office, and while I'm sitting here just now, right? Do you feel. I'm not making a phone call. It's not buzzing it's not beeping. I'm just holding it. Do you feel like you're the most important thing to me right now? No.

Right.

There's a deep seated psychological reaction to the device. I'm not doing anything. So when we show up to a meeting and we put the phone on the table, and by the way, putting the phone face down is not more polite.

Right. How do you think it makes people feel? Makes them feel that they're not the most important thing right now. If somebody walks into your office and is just on the desk, how do you think it makes people feel? Employees or patients.

Or worse. When somebody looks away and you're on it for 30 seconds, how do you think it makes people feel? Feel? Right. Put the phone away. When there's another person that you want them to feel like they matter, it's so easy. Put it in a back pocket, put it on a shelf, put it in a drawer. Eye contact. Thank you very much. Can you catch?

Well done. So eye contact, right? Facing your body towards somebody. Hey, can I talk to you? Sure. What's on your mind? Right. Little, little things. Like I said, these things in a vacuum do nothing. But if you do them over and over and over again, I can tell you how powerful they are. A Marine once told me, he says his test for being a leader is if you ask somebody how they're doing, you actually care about the answer. How are you? It's been a hard day. Okay, cool. Well, I'll check you after lunch.

No.

How are you not doing so good? What's going on? Right. These are skills. They're very easy to learn, they're very easy to practice, but you gotta do them. And over the course of time, sometimes quicker for some people, sometimes slower for others, you will build an environment, you will build a culture where people feel seen, feel heard, feel like they matter. And you will watch them give you their blood, sweat and tears to help your business grow. That's how it works.

So we've spent the last three days as a family, getting together, educating, but being motivated. And we come every year and we leave on fire. Monday morning is an awesome day. How can. But it's. The buzz is not what carries us through, it's the discipline of carrying it on. What advice would you give to these 5,000 people to take what they've learned and, and use it throughout the year?

So especially when you've been gone from work for a few days, you're not going to just start on Monday and be like, all right, back to work. Like, tell Them what you learned. Like, you have notes. You took notes for yourself. Like, set a meeting and say, I want to share some of the stuff that I've learned that might be valuable to you. Be super open and honest about your own leadership journey. I've always recommended, like, don't just hide it. Say, hey, I learned a bunch of stuff that I can do better. I'm going to practice being more open. I'm going to practice these little things. Hold me accountable, watch me. But you'll start to notice a difference. Don't be alarmed. I'm just practicing and I'm learning leadership. I realize I'm a great chiropractor, but I could. Maybe I could be a better leader, right? And so I'm going to start doing these things, and I hope that you can join me on this journey as well. But I'm going to be the example and. And I might stumble, but tell them specifically, I'm going to practice my listening skills. I'm going to practice giving and receiving feedback, you know, and then go learn about it. But be really open about it on Monday.

Communication, integrity, humility. I just came back from a leadership training, and one of the things they really were pushing was basically authentic communications. But then talking to my cabinet, like, these are the things I'm learning. We're going to. I'm going to. You're going to hear this from me. And this is the conversation. This is how we should do it, and meeting the expectations. And Also, I've had SBIs at this situation. We were sitting at the table and the behavior you did and the I would be how I interpreted it. And instead of. You may, you were arrogant when you said that. It wouldn't be. That would be inappropriate. It would be. I didn't feel as significant by the way you treated me and having those conversations. And that's what it sounds like you're doing is having those honest communications.

I have one more.

Got it.

This one's a huge one as well, which is narrative.

Especially if you have partners or other senior people. We start to create narratives about some of the people who work for us. That's the lazy one. That's the annoying one. That's the underperforming one. Right? What? What does he want now? Oh, he's so annoying. Oh, my God. Is she in the meeting again? Negative Nelly. Ugh, I hate having meetings with her. And the problem is when we talk about narrative in front of other people, if they're senior people, we're now labeling that person that thing. And we will Treat them as the lazy one, we will treat them as the under performer. We will treat them as the negative one. And for them, there's no getting out of that narrative. But by the way, they do the same thing for us. Like, you're the toxic boss, right? They have narratives about us too. But we set the behavior, make an example. Yeah, hypothetically.

Yeah, hypothetically.

So, so, but like, but we set the example. And so. And we're all guilty of this. We are all guilty of it. We are all guilty of it, of creating narratives about other people we work with. And so you have to nip that stuff in the bud. So when somebody says, oh, they're so lazy, they go. It's incumbent upon us to say maybe, or maybe they're stressed out, or maybe we've given them a job, they don't know how to do it, or maybe they're out of bandwidth, or maybe they've got stuff going on in their personal lives that we don't know about. You know, they could be lazy, but they could be a bunch of other things as well. So why don't we replace judgment with curiosity and learning to replace judgment with curiosity and give people the benefit of the doubt. It's amazing how it will transform a culture, because the way you will talk to people simply because the narrative you've changed is profound.

One of the things we encourage at Parker is when we have, I think five or six hundred CAs here, we have other business staff, we have business packages, groups of doctors would come. When you come together and you learn, I certainly come together for the keynotes. You come back, everybody, you don't have to explain everything you learned. You can discuss what you learned together. And that's why we go out of our way to make sure that we have the packages for the office. We want to transform your practice. You guys know this is not a seminar, just a seminar. This is an event that we want to make sure we equip you to succeed. And you're better succeed if you bring your whole team team with you. We've created another track that is designed beyond the biohack. So even if you bring your friend, your golf partner, people who refer patients to you, other physicians, we want you to come together so you can interact and you carry it back. And by having somebody else with you, you're gonna actually being able to grow. And let's get together a couple times this week and talk about that.

So, amen.

Well, we've come to the end of our time. I'd like to thank Simon for joining us today, and I hope you all enjoyed our time here.

We have several other seminars this year, but.

I would like to applaud you as well.

That was great.