Simon Sinek explains infinite-minded companies: they have a long-term just cause, invest in people through coaching and trust, and maintain consistent daily habits instead of bursts of intensity. WD-40, Barry-Wehmiller, and Patagonia do this well. Short-term financial pressure from VCs and IPOs undermines it.
Chapters
I think WD40, that makes WD40.
Fantastic company. So in other words, I'm tired of people saying, well, it's. You talk about Apple, it's easy for Apple because it's such a. I mean, seriously, WD40, right? That company is phenomenal. And they, they believe in coaching, they believe in taking care of their people. They believe in honesty. They have a just cause. It's about creating memories for people I know, for a lubrication company. And they have trusting teams. The people stay there. They don't leave because there's all this additional training that's offered to them. They believe anybody who's given any kind of position of leadership is immediately trained to be a coach. They don't hire outside coaches so that when people say, I'm struggling, I made a mistake, they don't fix it for them. They coach them how to fix it themselves. Everybody feels empowered to help, and everybody feels that somebody's there to help them. It's a remarkable company. I've written about Barry Wehmiller. It's a manufacturing company in the Midwest. Remarkable company. Many of the companies we love tend to have that focus, but some of them lose it. Patagonia is still wonderful, but Container Store great, you know, but some of them lose it. Walmart used to be infinite minded. Microsoft used to be infinite minded. I think under Satya, it's trying to get back what Ballmer broke. I think at Walmart, what Doug McMillan is doing is trying to get back what Mike Duke broke.
The reason they're still around is because they had a lot of money.
I think the biggest challenge is going to be really from.
Success is, I think, an organization's biggest challenge, quite frankly, because the pressures become greater and all the people who've been giving you money to help you grow now want something back. And it's the flaw in the business model of private equity and venture capital, which is they have to sell. You have to sell. They have to sell to get money, right? And so they can tell you all the flowery language how much they love you and how much they believe in your cause until about five years on average. They need their money back. All of a sudden they don't care as much. And so all that amounts to is pressure. We've forgotten what an IPO really was supposed to be. You know, when companies are growing, sometimes they want to raise money so they can continue their growth, continue to advance their just cause. There's many, many ways to raise money. You can ask your friends and family. You can take investment from venture capital or private equity. You can get a loan from the bank or you can sell some of your equity and you can issue an ipo. It's not a mechanism to get rich. It's a mechanism to raise money for the company to advance the cause. We've forgotten that. And I think there's a lot of well meaning companies that are forced to go public. That going public is what destroys them and their cultures worse. When you have these high speed growth companies and I don't understand why we're obsessed with high speed growth. There's only one thing in the world that grows for the sake of growth and that's cancer.
There has to be a purpose for growth, right? There has to be a purpose for growth. What is the purpose for growth? And it should be to advance the cause. But if you're just growing for the sake of growing, to prove to somebody or to make there's going to be a problem, it's going to break. Growth is a dial. It's not an objective, it's not a purpose. You know, so if you're a retail operation and you have a growth plan to open 100 stores this year, but you're not spending the time to hire the right people to work in those stores and train them properly, you'll open a hundred stores that are going to fail. Growth is a dial. So if you see that you're not hiring good people, you adjust the dial. We're only going to grow 20 stores so we can make sure that we train the right people, hire the right people and get the right people in the stores and then we'll worry about the other. In other words, it doesn't matter what the year end tells you, it's infinite. The finite markers are there for guidance. It's like, yes, metrics are important. The finite's important. You can't run a marathon without mile markers. It's unnerving. It's infinite. The finite markers are there for guidance. It's like, yes, metrics are important. The finite's important. You can't run a marathon without mile markers. It's unnerving when we don't know how fast or how far we've gotten. That's what metrics are. That's what goals are. They tell a how, they tell us how fast and how far. But they're not an indicator of the end of the game.
So, so I. The, generally, the companies that we love doing business with generally have elements of finite mindsetness.
But it's, it's like any, like any Gym process. It is a constant. It's constant. It's not an event, it's a lifestyle. It's not something you do, it's something you have to wake up every morning to do, like brushing your teeth, you know, and companies like to solve problems with intensity, but this is about consistency. Intensity is going to the dentist twice a year like we're told. But if that's all you ever did, your teeth are all going to fall out. Right, but intensity is scheduled. We know what we can expect. We need leadership. We have the company off site, we invite all the speakers, we give them a bunch of books. Everybody feels great for a couple of weeks. You didn't make a bunch of leaders. Is that necessary? Yes. But that's not enough. Like, intensity is like, I remembered her birthday, I bought her flowers on Valentine's Day. That should be enough. She'll fall in love with me, you know. Intensity is not enough. Consistency is king. Like brushing your teeth for two minutes. Once in the morning, once in the evening. That's what we're recommended. What does brushing your teeth do for two minutes? Nothing. Unless you do it twice a day, every day. Can I take a day off because I'm too tired? Yes. Yes, you can. It'll do no damage. How many days can I take off? I don't know. And nor does any dentist. Just don't do it too much. Consistency is king. What I'm talking about is consistency. And so every organization that we admire struggles with and tries to do these things consistently, which is much harder than intensity. Intensity is for show, necessary sometimes, but it's largely the stuff we can see. The they make movies about bad leaders, they don't make movies about good leaders. Right. Because it's about intensity. It's fun, it's exciting. Somebody comes in, barks orders, we all do what they say and we win the battle. Do you know what a well led organization looks like? It's boring. There's no movies about Eisenhower or Marshall.
There's no movies about Marshall. He was amazing. Do you know why? Because if you showed up in his organization, everybody's just working, things are just getting done.
You say, where's the bus? They all go. I don't know if you came in today like there's a fire. They just put it out.
No one's barking orders, nobody's screaming. They're just boring. But they're consistent so we can feel it. It's the ones we admire. The hard part is can they stick to it? And generally they don't because the pressure gets them, the courage is lacking.
