- I'm going to react to a recent presentation
from Simon Sinek.
An author and popular professional speaker.
Speaking is his full-time job.
So we can learn a lot
about how we might improve by watching his example.
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The clip we are going to look at today
is from Simon Sinek.
And it's one where he talks about
the importance of systematic leadership training.
So let's watch, and I will pause here and there to point
out what I notice, and then make some big picture comments
at the end.
- We don't teach people how to lead.
It's a skill.
It's a teachable, learnable practicable skill.
But we don't teach people how to do it.
So they don't do it.
Why are we surprised that people don't know how to lead?
It's not necessarily because they're bad people.
It's that we didn't show them how to do it, right?
If we didn't show somebody how to be an accountant,
you wouldn't give them your taxes.
'Cause nobody showed them.
They might be able to do it.
And even if people are--
- I love how he makes a connection right away
to something that we obviously know
we need training in.
Accounting.
So he's saying, look, accounting is important.
Leadership is important.
We need to train people.
I love his point already.
- Well, the good leaders, it's not natural.
It's that they learned it from someone else.
Their parents,
or they had a really great boss that they role modeled,
or maybe they had a really bad boss,
they're like, I'm doing everything the opposite.
Right?
So they still learned it from somewhere.
So we have to teach leadership.
We do a very, very bad job
in the corporate world, of teaching people, how to lead.
And as we promote them,
we give them a one day off-sight and we call them leaders.
Congratulations.
Nah, man, it's gotta be regular and ongoing.
And we have to build into their incentive structures.
Into their bonus packages.
Not just how much money they make,
but how they treat people.
- I love his point already.
Of course, this is what this channel is all about,
is leadership training.
Really clear point.
Sinek always knows exactly what he wants to say.
He's very direct.
We need to train people how to be good leaders.
So as a public speaker,
you wanna be really clear in the point you're making.
And I just really appreciate his style as well.
His, we call it style
in public speaking classes and rhetoric.
And that's his direct style of language.
He's not trying to flower
up everything he's saying with overly fancy words.
He's got a couple of technical terms,
because he's speaking to business people.
But he's really speaking pretty directly to everybody.
To the entire Microsoft audience.
He's speaking to Microsoft here.
A lot of inexperienced speakers,
a lot of insecure speakers,
will use big words, technical words,
to try to impress their audience.
He doesn't care about impressing his audience.
He wants to impress upon them
the importance of this message.
He wants to reach them and motivate him.
And that's why he's using a direct style.
- Right?
It was part of her question before.
She's like, we're trying to do this growth, revenue,
and also look after our customers.
But the order of the information
is really, really important.
I talked about in the infinite game
that there are two currencies, will and resources.
In that order, right?
I'll give you two hypothetical examples.
Hypothetical example number one.
Is a C, by the way, I've never met a CEO,
who doesn't think their people are important.
The problem is where on the list.
Number one, growth,
number two, shareholder value.
Right?
Number three, our customer,
and number four our employee.
See? It's one of my priorities.
Number four, right there.
(audience laughing)
Right? - It's great.
- But that's the problem.
The problem is the order.
So here are the two hypothetical examples.
CEO number one.
Says, my number one priority is growth.
And of course, we care about our people.
Because without our people,
we'll never be able to achieve our financial goals.
See number two.
Number one priority is our people.
And if we take care of people,
I know we will meet and exceed all our financial goals.
Which company you want to work for?
(audience murmuring)
It's easy.
And human beings are funny.
We can't help ourselves.
We have a tell, which is we speak in the order.
We tend to speak in the order of our own priorities.
- Aha.
- So when you hear somebody go, you know, guys,
we have to be preoccupied with growth and the revenue,
of course, of course we have to take care of our people.
(man hisses)
Go read the press releases.
When Mike Duke took over Walmart,
he talked about growth, people.
And then you go read the same press release,
from Doug McMillan.
He talked about our people and growth.
Go read the press release.
When Satya took over,
he talks about our people first.
He talks about human beings first.
- Oh, I love this.
So what he's doing here is, he has a very deliberate style
of ordering his ideas.
We call this arrangement.
What he's doing is, he's making his key point.
And that is you have to pay attention to what we prioritize.
And then he's listing a bunch of examples
that show us how people prioritize.
He's making his point,
and then he's backing it up
with numerous pieces of evidence to convince us.
The idea doesn't speak for itself.
You got to prioritize people,
And you can tell by the way they talk.
Then he gives an example about hypothetical CEO one,
who's about growth.
Hypothetical CEO two, who is about people.
And the different press releases from Walmart.
And in the CEO of Microsoft, where he's speaking.
These are all pieces of evidence
that support the point above it.
That's great arrangement.
You don't want to be scattered and bounced
from point to example, points to example.
He has a point,
and then he backs up with numerous examples.
Really really nails it home, really hammers it home.
Excellent job.
- This matters, right?
And this is one of the things that we're suffering
in the world today.
Which is most of the standard business practices
that we use today, are actually leftovers
from the '80s and '90s.
A man by the name of Milton Friedman,
an economist from the 1970s,
theorized the responsibility of business.
And he wrote, that the responsibility of business
is to maximize profits within the bounds of the rules.
Within the bounds of the law.
Right? What about ethics?
We've all seen companies
do very, very very uncomfortable things,
and they get dragged out in front of government
and they all say the same thing.
We did nothing illegal.
- That's true.
- Completely within our rights.
- That's true.
- Yeah, that doesn't make it right
just 'cause it was legal, right?
There's something called ethics,
right?
When a pharmaceutical company raises the price
of a drug that people need to survive 500, 600, 700%.
There's nothing illegal about that.
But it's really unethical,
right?
And the problem is, is the 1970s,
that theory to a new new group of investors
was really appealing.
And so they started experimenting
with new ways of doing business based on that definition.
And in during the eighties and nineties,
we started to see that become really, really popular.
So the concept of using mass layoffs
on an annualized basis to balance the books,
did not exist prior to the 1980s.
And people like Jack Welch over at GE,
started practicing it,
and it started to gain acceptance.
And now it's normal.
We've either been subjected to layoffs,
our company has used those layoffs,
or we've lost a friend or a family to layoffs.
A friend of a family has been subjected to layoffs.
All of us, right?
One degree of freedom, if not zero degrees of freedom.
Right?
Of separation, I mean.
Rank and yank, where we rank people's contribution
to stock price or revenue.
And the top 10% get promoted,
the bottom 10% get fired.
That's in the '80s and 90s, right?
The obsession with shareholder value,
and shareholder supremacy.
Where we prioritize on the wants and needs, desires,
of an external constituency, over our own customers,
and over our own employees.
That's like asking a coach
who's trying to build a good team,
what the fans want, rather than what the players need.
But that's the standard of business today.
- [Man] He's right.
- He is on fire.
He is fire, as the young people say.
So I want to talk about something called invention.
Invention is an old fashioned word,
for how we gather materials,
before we ever stand up and speak.
To create our speech.
And he has done a ton of homework.
Now, it sounds like he's coming up with these examples
off the top of his head, but he has done his homework.
So again he's following that structure
that I mentioned a moment ago
on arrangement and how he orders his ideas.
He has his point.
That is, these are,
most of the practices that we use now
are leftover from a bygone era.
From the '80s.
By the way, the '80s was great in a lot of other ways.
But yeah, we had some bad, weird business practices.
That's his point.
And then he lists example after example,
like jacking up pharmaceutical prices,
or quotation, rank and yank, mass layoffs.
He gives all these examples.
And it sounds like, if you don't know better,
that he's thinking of maybe off these off the top
of his head, but he's not.
I know a lot of speakers
who have a basic idea of what they want to say.
And then they think, oh, we'll just think of some examples.
Once they get up there,
I'm sure something will come to them.
They'll get inspired.
That usually doesn't work out.
Those aren't the very best speakers.
So what he has done beforehand,
is he has created and invented.
That's why they call it invention.
All these different ideas and concepts,
and examples and stories,
and even a little bit of humor here.
And he's weaving them together, those materials together
to support his point.
Oh, I just love this.
This is, he is on a roll.
- And so the problem is, we need to reject that.
It was great for the '80s and '90s.
It was great for these boom years,
where everybody made money.
It no longer works.
What got us here will not get us there.
We have to abandon
the practices of Jack Welch, and Milton Friedman,
of the '80s and '90s.
Then we need to do it our way, for the modern day.
To your point, we need to build empathetic leaders.
We need to build leaders who understand
that their responsibility is a human job.
We don't sit behind desks,
and lead a company from spreadsheets.
We cannot, because as we've seen,
it creates discontent inside our companies.
There's no such thing as loyalty anymore.
There's no such thing as a gold watch
at the end of your career, it doesn't exist anymore.
There's an entire group of people in this room,
who are too young,
that when I say the word gold watch,
they don't even know what I'm talking about.
- Yeah.
- Right? He has no idea
what I'm talking-- - Do you know what
he's talking about?
- Time that you worked for 40 years, for one company,
and they gave you a gold watch.
(woman in audience laughs)
The point is, is there's an opportunity to change it.
And the opportunity is ours.
- Really powerful stuff.
So big picture, I want to talk about his delivery.
I probably could have started with delivery.
Because his delivery is so passionate,
and so emphatic, that when he gets excited,
it makes me get excited watching him.
And it's one of the great things about Sinek.
He's a very dynamic, passionate presenter.
And one of the ways he does that,
is he really knows his stuff.
You notice, he's not looking at any kind of notes
that we can see, certainly not using a teleprompter.
He might have some notes somewhere that he can glance at,
but he is just rolling with this message.
He's not improvising though.
He knows his stuff.
He's internalized it.
He also is now free.
Because he's internalized it,
he's free to express himself.
He's got amazing gestures.
He's got a passionate voice.
He speaks very rapidly,
which can create a sense of momentum and energy,
and persuasion to what he's saying.
That's a huge strength for him.
And it all really comes together in this package.
And part of the package is his appearance.
If you notice he's got rolled up sleeves,
he doesn't have a tie, just a nice press shirt on.
And he's delivering this message in a way like,
let's get to work on this.
This is something that we need to accomplish together.
He's not all fancied up.
Dressed like a sales person with a tie,
and a suit that's too expensive.
Trying to bowl us over with his appearance.
He's just there to work, and get passionate, and excited.
And I think, if you're listening to this, like I am,
he is amazing at drawing me in.
I don't know, I'm not even working
at this company, and I am fired up to hear his message.
So three points before we go, first of all,
what are your thoughts on his presentation skills?
His public speaking skills.
Second.
Who else should I react to?
I would love to hear your suggestions.
And third, don't forget to check out that link
for Skillshare, where you can take some online classes.
Until next time, thanks. God bless.
And I will see you soon.