Simon Sinek

Shawn Murphy: Hello, this is Shawn Murphy with Work That Matters, and I want to
welcome you to another episode. Happy New Year.

Today’s guest is Simon Sinek. And as you know, as a new podcast, we have been
advocates for humanizing the workplace. And I can’t think of a better person to invite to
talk about, what exactly does that mean? It’s a vague word—“humanize the workplace”—
or a vague phrase. And what Simon has been able to do is give some strong explanations
for “What does that mean?” And in his latest book, Leaders Eat Last, he uses science to
help us understand what it means to create safety for people in our workplace and the
responsibility each of us has as leaders. So, we’re going to explore that today, in-depth.

Simon, welcome to the show.

Simon Sinek: Thanks. Nice to be here.

Shawn: You’re getting ready to go on a pretty big book tour, and we’re on the eve of that
for you. I’m actually kind of happy because I have you fresh right now, before you get on
long flights and talks and whatnot. So, we’re going to start off with a quote from your book.

Simon: Mm-hmm.

Shawn: And it’s a powerful message in the chapter called “Abstraction Kills,” and it’s
this: “When we divorce ourselves from humanity through numerical abstraction, we are
capable of inhuman behavior.” Then you go on to say, “The physical separation between
us and those on the receiving end of our decisions can have a dramatic impact on lives,
the lives of people who cannot be seen or heard. The more abstract people become, the
more capable we are doing them harm.”

Can you riff on what this means? ‘Cause it’s a pretty powerful statement.

Simon: Yeah, sure. To quote Joseph Stalin, “The death of one man is a tragedy;
the death of a million is a statistic.” And he’s right. The fact is that when numbers become
large, they start to lose their humanity, they start to lose their connection to the human
being. You know, when we hear about one person who loses their life in a sort of tragic
way, it pulls at our heartstrings. When we hear about a thousand people, though we can
intellectually understand it’s hard, it doesn’t make us cry, you know?

Shawn: Yeah.

Simon: And so, in business today, work is increasingly abstract. The numbers we
deal in tend to be larger. We tend to deal with many more customers than ever before,
thanks to the benefits of technology. Sometimes, the customers truly are distant,
impersonal things. We do business with people through Internet connections, and literally,
no human being will ever see or touch them.

Shawn: Right.

Simon: And when this happens, when people cease to be people and start to
become numbers, the biology is pretty clear, the biology is pretty stark, which is we have
the capacity to make decisions that will harm people, not because we’re bad people—it’s
because those people ceased to become people. They became just numbers. You see
this a lot in many, many ways. The decision to put partially hydrogenated oils, for example,
or other sort of harmful chemicals into our food—why would we do that? Because we’re
driving costs down.

Shawn: Yeah.

Simon: It becomes a number thing, you know? It’s not because we actually put it
together and feed it to our child. Then, we probably wouldn’t put those ingredients in.

The decision to make layoffs, though always a difficult decision, is much easier when you
don’t have to walk into somebody’s office and say, “Hey, Steve, I got to let you go,” you
know? “I’ve known you for years, and our kids play together, but you know, times are
tough.” It’s much easier when you’re looking at a spreadsheet and say, “Oh, we got to get
rid of 3,000 people because the numbers just aren’t there,” irrespective and forgetting the
fact that we’re destroying lives, we’re destroying livelihoods. We’re completely... We’re
sending people home to tell their spouses, “Honey, we no longer have an income because
they had to balance the books this year.”
And again, it’s not that bad people are making these decisions. It’s when people become
abstractions, we are more capable of making these decisions that can cause harm.

Shawn: Yeah. It’s almost like a shortcut, and oftentimes, I’ll say the word “human
resources” or “capital” or “people are our greatest assets.” We’re not assets, we’re not
resources, we’re not capital—we’re human beings. All of those other words are, you
know, they’re limited.

Simon: Yeah.

Shawn: As human beings, we have unlimited capacity. And it’s a shortcut to say,
“Oh, well, we do need to cut our overhead by 20 percent because we have to reduce our
expenses,” because it’s a faceless... An asset, a resource, a number is faceless.

Simon: Yeah. You know, when times are tough, a family doesn’t get rid of one of
their children.

Shawn: No.

Simon: Children are very expensive.

Shawn: Yeah.

Simon: If you want to have a kid... I mean, it is very expensive to have a child, and
you don’t really see a return on that investment for... 20 years, if not more. So, it’s the
same attitude, which is there are other ways to tighten expenses. You go from name-
brand Cheerios to generic-brand Cheerios.

Shawn: Yeah.

Simon: There are other ways organizations can tighten expenses. There are other
things that can be done. Layoffs are perfectly valid as a last resort or when all other
options have been exhausted, but when it’s becoming increasingly common to be a first
choice or an early choice is when bad things happen.

Shawn: Yeah.

Simon: Yeah.

Shawn: A part of what’s circling this part of the conversation is the word “safety,”
and I think one of the... Central to your book is the concept that you call “circle of safety.”

Simon: Yeah.

Shawn: Talk a little bit about what the implications are for leaders with the “circle of
safety.”

Simon: It’s a very basic concept, and it goes back to the Paleolithic era. Fifty
thousand years ago, Homo sapiens took his first steps on the planet Earth. And we
weren’t the strongest animal, and we’re certainly not the fastest animal, and there were
other hominid species that existed in that time. So, why is it that we survived and thrived
and the others died off? Well, one of the things, one of the reasons is we’re highly, highly
social animals. In other words, we need each other. We’re not very good by ourselves,
but together, we’re pretty fantastic.

Shawn: Right.

Simon: We’re tribal. We lived in tribes that maxed out at about 150 people. And
when you look at the way that those tribes are organized, there’s sort of... there’s the
outside world. The world was filled with danger, things that were trying to kill you or
frustrate your growth, you know? Saber-toothed tigers, the weather, lack of resources—
whatever it was, all of these things—nothing personal—were trying to end your life. And
so, only when we felt safe amongst our own tribe, only when we felt that we could trust
and cooperate, would we combine our skills and our talents and our forces to face and
confront those dangers outside.
The modern-day world is exactly the same. The outside world is filled with dangers,
whether it’s the ups and downs of an economy, whether it’s the vicissitudes of the stock
market, whether it’s your competition, that it sometimes really is trying to kill you and put
you out of business but, at the very minimum, is trying to steal your customers or at least
prevent you from getting more. In other words, these things that are nothing personal, just
trying to frustrate your growth.

Shawn: Yeah.

Simon: And they are, by the way, a constant. They are not going to change, and
they’re never going to go away. These dangers are always there. And so, the only way to
confront these dangers is when we feel safe in the places we work, amongst our own.
And in organizations where they feel safe amongst their own, innovation skyrockets, trust
skyrockets, cooperation skyrockets, productivity skyrockets, and they combine forces to
face the dangers. When we fear those with whom we work, when we have to protect
ourselves from each other, when we fear our leaders, then inherently, we’re taking our
eye off the outside, and we inherently weaken the whole organization. It’s only when we
feel safe amongst ourselves that we’re better able to confront dangers and seize
opportunities.

Shawn: So, I—

Simon: And I call that a “circle of safety,” being inside a “circle of safety.”

Shawn: And you actually give a really good example to start this discussion in the
book, with a fable from Aesop.

Simon: Yes, yes. Aesop said it a lot better than me. He tells of... Aesop, as in
Aesop’s Fables, tells the story of four oxen who stand tail-to-tail, and no matter from which
angle the lion attacks, he’s always met by horns. However, due to in-fighting and
disagreements, the four oxen decide to graze in different parts of the field, and one by
one, the lion eats them all. That’s a “circle of safety.”

Shawn: Yeah. Like you, I’m an optimist and, at times, have been told—at my
detriment—that my optimism sometimes gets in the way of my better judgment. But I can
only imagine what it’s like to have a work environment... And this is what drives my
consulting, and this is what drives my writing is, imagine more organizations, like those
that you feature in your book—Barry-Wehmiller, for example—that create a place that is
so safe that employees, even when—and this happened for Bob Chapman at Barry-
Wehmiller—even when they were facing “Gosh, do we lay off people?” and instead of
laying off people, they found other ways to ensure that they met that profit need, and they
created such a safe space that employees were willing to do what it took to get the work
done, even when times were limited, resources were limited.

Simon: Mm-hmm.

Shawn: That’s an amazing possibility that is worth being optimistic about. Why not?

Simon: Bob Chapman doesn’t believe in head counts. He believes in heart counts.

Shawn: Yeah.

Simon: And when you put it that way—“How many hearts do we have working for
us?” versus “How many heads do we have working for us?”—it kind of changes things up
a little bit, you know?

Shawn: Well, it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, which is,
is it just a number, or is this a human being? Is this is a soul that we’re responsible for?

Simon: Right. And Bob’s company has 6,000 people. It’s not like it’s a... These
themes are usually talked about for small businesses, and it’s believed falsely that these
things don’t work at scale. And they absolutely do. And there are plenty of large
organizations, you know, the United States Marine Corps, 200,000 people, where these
same themes exist.

What Barry-Wehmiller did was quite sophisticated. What Bob Chapman did was kind of
amazing. In 2008, when the economy hit the skids, they lost 30 percent of their orders,
sort of overnight kind of thing, and for the first time in many years, faced the problem,
which is they couldn’t afford their labor pool. And the topic of layoffs was raised, and Bob
refused. And instead, what they did was they implemented a four-week furlough. So,
every employee had to take four weeks of unpaid vacation, they could take it whenever
they wanted, and they didn’t have to take it consecutively. But it was how Bob delivered
the message that was so important. What he told the company when he announced the
furlough was, “Better we should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a
lot.”

Shawn: Yeah.

Simon: And what happened was morale went up, and remarkable things started to
happen organically. People who could afford it more traded with people who could afford
it less. So, some people took three weeks so that others could take five... You know,
some took five weeks so that others could take three, for example. And it did a remarkable
thing, and they all went through it together. And if you asked any employee at the time of
facing layoffs, “Would you rather take four weeks of unpaid vacation or lose your job?” I
think the answer’s pretty easy. And by the way, when they looked at the numbers, they
said, “Well, why don’t we just cut everybody’s pay by five percent?” ‘cause it would do the
same math. And it was the same reasons as “No, no, no, we’re not going to cut
everybody’s pay by five percent. That’s not how we’re going to do this.

My point is that, for some reason, in the past 30 years, we started to see layoffs as the
best option or, sometimes, the only option, and it’s just false.

Shawn: Yeah.

Simon: It’s just false.

Shawn: It goes back to what I said earlier. I think it’s a shortcut. It’s much easier just
to cut staff than it is to think of creative ways, if you will, to be able to save that—

Simon: And it’s so ridiculous, beyond the obvious, beyond the obvious.

Shawn: Yeah.

Simon: Judy is sitting at her desk, and her friend who sits next to her got laid off.
Well, how do you think that makes Judy feel?
Shawn: Right.

Simon: So, you’re not only... You destroy the morale of the people who stay, and
what you do is instil a culture of fear. In other words, every time there’s a speed bump,
every time the economy shimmies a little bit, every time the company misses its numbers
by a couple of basis points, whatever it is, everybody goes, [gasps]. And when that
happens, and we fear our leaders, we fear that our leaders would sooner sacrifice us to
save the numbers than they would sacrifice the numbers to save us, all of a sudden, we
entrench, we become self-interested, we stop giving, we stop caring, we stop trusting, we
stop cooperating, and we’re certainly not innovating, we’re certainly not going the extra
mile.

This is the irony, which is these companies are doing this in the name of efficiency, they’re
doing this in the name of productivity, are absolutely destroying efficiency, productivity,
innovation, cooperation, trust—destroying them. And by the way, they don’t come back
easily. They do not come back easily. You don’t have a round of laughs and tell
everybody, “Don’t worry. You’re fine.” What, are you kidding? It just doesn’t work that
way.

Shawn: Yeah, yeah.

Simon: It just doesn’t work that way.

Shawn: Yeah. I spent most of my career working in human resources, and I left
human resources because the VP of HR where I was working said to me... And I was
responsible for figuring out, how do we get more people to use our tuition reimbursement
program? So, I overhauled the program, and part of the design piece was, hey,
employees have a personal life. Why not incentivize them to improve on their personal
life as well in their professional life?

Simon: Yeah.

Shawn: And the VP turned to me and said, “Shawn, we are not here to help people
self-actualize. If we aren’t paying for something that is related to their job, then we’re not
doing it.” And I thought to myself, these are human beings that are giving us most of their
time—
Simon: Well, we don’t even have to get ooey-gooey about it. We don’t even have
to be like, “Oh, but they’re people, they’re living...” We don’t even have to do it that... We
don’t even have to do it. That human resources “manager” is an idiot because if he is
charged, even selfishly, to maximize the productivity of that organization, then what he’s
completely failing to recognize is that happy people do better work. Fulfilled people do
better work. Recognized people are loyal and go the extra mile and sacrifice, sacrifice,
their home lives for the good of the company, willingly and happily, and—here’s the
kicker—feel good when they do. So, I would say that that HR executive is shortsighted,
and if the company is looking to operate only for the short term, he’s doing a brilliant job.
If they’re looking to outdo their competition, if they’re looking to innovate, and if they’re
looking to last for any significant period of time, then he’s the one who should lose his job
and maybe take a course in self-actualization when he’s got his time off.

Simon: Well, hear, hear. You will get no argument from me on that one.

So, hey, let’s switch gears a little bit. There’s a couple of different topics that I want to
explore in the book. And we’ve been really talking a little bit about this indirectly, but you
talk about it more specifically in the book, and it’s about belonging. The purpose of this
podcast, as I said, is to humanize the workplace and to help employees recognize and
know, help managers help employees know that they’re doing work that matters. An
important component to that is the sense of belonging and belonging creating a culture
that unites people to help the organization grow.

Simon: Mm-hmm.

Shawn: So, talk about this important role of belonging and the managers’
responsibility to help foster that.

Simon: Well, let’s take a slight diversion. Nobody wants to be managed. People
want to be led. Nobody wakes up in the morning and goes, “I hope I get managed today.”
So, the concept of the manager is not conducive with an organization that is hoping to
build trust and cooperation in their organization. We’re looking for leaders, right? We don’t
want managers—we want leaders. And leaders can come at all levels of the organization.
They don’t have to be in positions of authority or executive positions to be leaders. So,
that’s number one. Our desire to feel like we belong is the most basic human desire. We
all want it. You see this in gangs. People who don’t have a sense of belonging for their
communities or their families, they join a gang. Why? So they feel like they belong.
Because when we feel like we belong, we feel safe. When we’re amongst people who
believe what we believe or who share something in common with us, when we feel like
we belong, we relax, and we become devoted to those around us. And so, it’s sort of the
essential starting point.

So, the question is this: How do you get people to feel like they belong? Well, it starts with
values and beliefs. Are you one of us? Do you believe what we believe? Do you share
our vision of the future? Do you want to build the world we imagine? And this is one of
the great values of an organization articulating its vision. To become the biggest, the
fastest, the best, the leading—these are not visions. These are simply goals. Nobody
wakes up in the morning excited to be a part of a company to make them the biggest. It’s
just not there. But an organization committed to building a world that does not yet exist—
that’s vision.

Steve Jobs... The vision, the genius of Steve Jobs is that he understood that people would
not take advantage of technology, and in the case of the birth of Apple, the personal
computer, until they changed the technology to seamlessly integrate into our lives and
not force us to change to fit the computers. Right? He didn’t want people to have to learn
DOS. That was ridiculous. You didn’t change your life to take advantage of the
technology. You change the technology to fit into our lives. And so, this is why he created
the graphic user interface, or he at least popularized it. This is why they took all the
buttons off an iPhone and added one button. Does it do fewer things than other phones?
Absolutely. Is it intuitive? Yes. Do any Apple products come with instruction manuals?
No. They don’t even come with instruction manuals.

Shawn: That’s a good point.

Simon: Right? And this is the reason... This was his vision. And don’t forget:
Windows was built to mimic the Apple user interface. Right?

And again, the idea is we will take advantage of technology when we change the
technology to fit the way we live our lives, not change our lives to fit the way the technology
works. This is vision. This is vision. And this gives people marching orders. And if there
are technologists and engineers and back-office people and support staff and leadership,
whoever they are inside the company, if they believe in this, they work tirelessly,
committing all of their skills and talents to see that this vision comes to life. And they do it
internally as well as externally. That’s the most important part.

Shawn: So, what I’m hearing you talk about here is let’s get rid of the word
“manager,” let’s focus on the word “leader” and tap into... And I’m not going to get into
this because we don’t have enough time. But the science of being human is essential for
us to recognize how to connect with people, how people might respond to the way that I
am leading or that I’m not leading. Before we move to what I call the six—

Simon: Right.

Shawn: Before I move to the six ubiquitous questions, I want to ask you this last
question. You had done an interview—I think it was in the summertime, it might have
been in the fall—with Jonathan Fields on the Good Life Project.

Simon: Yeah.

Shawn: And you share a very powerful story about a trip that you took to
Afghanistan. And a lesson that you took out of that is what I want to have you focus on.
And that lesson was serving those who serve others and how important that is to you.

Simon: Yeah.

Shawn: Can you talk a little bit about that for us?

Simon: Sure. In August of 2011, I had the honor of getting to visit Bagram air base
in Afghanistan as a guest of the United States Air Force to see their men and women
perform their duties. And this was what they asked me to do, to go see it.

And on our trip, everything went wrong at various times. We landed in the middle of the
night. We hadn’t even got off plane yet, and 10 minutes after being on the ground, the
base came under rocket attack. You could hear the rockets land. Strangely enough, I was
relaxed, I think probably because the people around me were relaxed. I’ve never been in
a war zone. I’m not trained for this. I don’t know what to expect. I didn’t expect this for
sure. I thought it would be safe on base. And this is how I start my trip.

We make our way to where we were staying. We got a few hours of sleep that night, just
two or three hours of sleep, two-and-a-half, three hours of sleep. And the next morning,
we went and did an airdrop, which was an amazing experience, where we flew out to a
forward operating base, dropped down low, the backdoor of the C-17 opened up, and we
sort of, you know, all the cargo flies out the back and supplies, resupplies the Army. We
flew back, and the goal was now to come home. We were only supposed to be in-country
for up to 30 hours. And so, we jumped on a plane. It’s always based on availability and
the discretion of the pilots, and we found a plane that was leaving. And after an hour or
two of waiting, we were told we’re good to go. We were sitting on the plane, our seatbelts
on, when the pilot came up to us and said, “I need to bump you guys. I need more room
for stretchers.” It was carrying wounded warriors out of the country. And if there’s ever a
good reason to get bumped off a plane, that’s it.

So, we went to try and find another flight out, and we couldn’t find one. And it turns out
there wasn’t going to be another flight out for at least four days. And there was no
guarantee that we were going to get on that plane. And I hadn’t told my family where I
was going because I didn’t want them to worry, so now, I was going to be four days late.
It’s not like I can call them and be like, “Hey, I’m going to be late. I’m in Afghanistan,” you
know?

Shawn: “By the way.”

Simon: “By the way,” yeah. So, we went back to our housing. I was exhausted. I lay
on my bed, closed my eyes. My mind was racing too much to sleep, but I just lay there
with my eyes closed. One of the officers... I traveled with two officers. One of the officers
went to see if he can get us another flight, and the other one went to the gym. And they
turned the lights off when they walked out, thinking I was asleep.

And there I lay, realizing, you know, just paranoid. I became absolutely paranoid. I
became, everything... I was convinced we were going to get another rocket attack. I was
convinced it was going to hit me. I became completely preoccupied in a state of fear, you
know, not knowing... And in all this uncertainly, I became completely preoccupied with my
safety, my comfort, my happiness, and I didn’t care about anybody else. I totally regretted
going, and I realized I was living this compressed life, an entire career compressed into
these 24 hours, where we mistake exciting moments for having a fulfilled life, but the
reality is we don’t want to wake up and do it the next day. And this is what was happening
to me. I had an amazing day, but I didn’t want to wake up and do it again. And I didn’t
know what to do. I was literally beside myself.

And so, I gave up. I lay there, and I gave up. And I decided that if I’m going to get stuck
here, I might as well make myself useful. I would speak if they wanted me to speak. I
would volunteer. I would carry boxes or sweep floors, whatever they wanted me to do; it
didn’t matter. But I wanted to serve those who served others. And literally, upon that
decision, that conclusion, I felt fine, relaxed, excited even.

As if it were a movie—the timing was uncanny—the door flies open. It was the major. He
says, “I’ve got us on a flight. There’s been a flight that’s been redirected, but we have to
leave now. If we don’t leave now, we’re going to miss it. We’ve got to go.” So, we ran over
to the gym to get the other officer. We ran back. He didn’t have time to shower. He
grabbed his stuff, and we ran out to the flight line.

As we got to the flight line, the security was shut down, and we couldn’t get to our plane.
We could see it, but we couldn’t get to it because there was a fallen soldier ceremony
happening somewhere else on the base. And out of respect, everything stops for the
moment they have the fallen soldier ceremony. Eventually, the security cordon came up,
and we boarded our C-17. We would be the only passengers aboard this cargo plane,
and there would only be one piece of cargo because the reason this flight was redirected
is that we would be carrying home the soldier for whom they just had the fallen soldier
ceremony. We stood on the plane and waited, and the Army brought the flag-draped
casket aboard the aircraft, laid it in the middle of this huge cargo plane, saluted, and
walked off the plane. The Air Force crew got to work and strapped down this precious
cargo, and we got going.

It was a nine-and-a-half-hour flight, overnight, back to Germany. And we sat there. The
casket was 15 feet away from me, 10 feet away from me. Just the three of us, by
ourselves, sitting, staring at this casket as we took off. On every other flight I took, we
talked, we joked, we had fun. Barely a word was said to anybody on this flight. On every
other flight, I visited the cockpit, talked to the crew. On this flight, I didn’t even step foot
into the cockpit. And it was the greatest honor of my life, to bring home someone who
knows a lot more about service than I ever will. And that’s when I learned that service,
that fulfilment comes from serving those who serve others.

And on our final mission, which was from Germany, back home, was an aeromedical
mission, bringing home 32 wounded soldiers and marines. And there was one marine on
the back of the plane who was in what they call CCATT, critical care. He was kept in an
artificial coma. He had two broken legs, two broken arms, shrapnel in his chest, broken
eye socket, punctured eyeball—he was in bad shape. And I went to talk to the docs who
were looking after him. And the one doc who was in charge was a reservist from Austin
who works in an ER. And I asked him a strange question, having just had the experience
I had just a few hours before. I asked him, “Do you have a different sense of fulfillment
here than you do back at home? I mean, you do noble work. You save lives back at
home.” And he said to me, he said to me, “There’s no comparison.” He said, “90 to 95
percent of the people who come into an ER are either drunks or idiots. That’s what lands
them in the ER in the first place.” He says, “There’s not a single drunk or idiot here.” He
says, “The sense of fulfillment is vastly greater here than it is back home.” And again, his
sense of fulfillment, the reason he loves being a reservist, the reason he loves doing these
missions is because he gets to serve those who serve others.

And this is what it means to create a “circle of safety.” This is what it means when I say
leaders eat last, like a parent feeds their child before they feed themselves. A leader puts
the interest of their people before they put the interest of themselves. That doesn’t mean
they have to be martyrs, but when it counts, you put other people first. And this is the
qualification required for leadership: to care for the people to the right of us and the people
to the left of us. That’s all it is. And when we do that, people will trust us, and most
importantly, they’ll want to be there for us.

And by the way, for that leader who... In the Marine Corps, when you go to any Marine
Corps chow hall anywhere in the world, they line up in rank order. Nobody tells them they
have to, it’s not in a rulebook—they just do it. The most junior person eats first, and the
most senior people stand at the back of the line. And if the food runs out, and that leader
at the back doesn’t get to eat, I promise you, once they get outside, his or her men or
women will... The other marines who did eat will bring their leader food because that’s
what we do—we look out for each other. We look after those who look after us. And the
feeling, on a very biological level, is amazing.

Shawn: Well, yeah, I’ve heard this story now a couple of times, and I think it’s better
each time for me. I think because it serves as such a powerful reminder of what our role
is as a leader, and whether it’s leading an organization, military, a team that we are part
of, this serves as a real powerful message, story, for all of us to think about how do we
show up to help and serve others? And I couldn’t think of a better way to end this interview.

I’ll say this as a personal note. You mentioned the word “ooey-gooey” a few minutes ago,
and you know, sometimes, those of us who get passionate about this topic tend to lean
towards the ooey-gooey, and you provide for us, in Leaders Eat Last, a little bit of the
ooey-gooey but a lot of the science and a lot of strong research to say, here’s why it’s
important for leaders to eat last. So, I want to say thank you for being such an important
voice in this conversation.

Simon: My pleasure. Thank you.

Shawn: Yeah. So, on a different note, we’re going to run through these last six
questions, as those who listen know that these questions are a way for us to kind of get
to know you in a little different light. The first question is, what inspires you in life?

Simon: The things that inspire me are stories of service. I can very easily be brought
to tears when I hear the sacrifice so many made for another. It’s an amazing thing. Stories
of passion, people who do things for the love of something and not for the numbers.
If you’ve ever seen the documentary Senna, about the race car driver Ayrton Senna, it is
the starkest, most beautiful documentary, whether you like race-car driving or not. It is the
most beautiful depiction of passion versus the pursuit of numbers. And I cry every time...
I’ve seen it six times, seven times, that documentary, and I cry every time at the same
two points. And the first point is when he puts himself through the most extraordinary pain
simply to win a race that he didn’t need to win. He was already ahead in the standings.
To win a race simply for the home team, for the Brazilian fans. And it’s amazing. It’s an
amazing... I’m choking up right now. It is amazing to see somebody do something, to put
themselves through excruciating pain for someone else.

Shawn: Yeah. Well, we’ll definitely link to that in the show notes. It sounds great.
What’s capturing your attention these days?

Simon: I like politics and government. And it’s no news that our own Congress is an
abysmal example of what leadership should be but a fine example of what selfish pursuits
will net you. But again, I’m an optimist, and I see glimmers of hope, and I know there are
good people who serve in the Congress, and I like to keep tabs on what’s going on.

Shawn: Yeah. What book has had a major influence on the way you think?

Simon: I would say there’s three. One is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
It’s, I think, required reading for everyone but especially for business people.

The second one is a book called Finite and Infinite Games. It’s a weird, funny little rinky-
dink book written by an NYU professor 20 years ago. And it really changes the way you
see the world, that if you can play the long game, you win. And it’s those who play the
short game that will end up frustrated. And at the end of the day, business is a long game.

And the third one is called Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet. I was a fan of Capt.
Marquet before I got to meet him. I was a fan of his work, and he’s since become a dear
friend, and he’s probably one of the greatest leadership commentators of our day. And
his personal experience in the book that he recounts in his... The experience that he
recounts in his book is the yin to my yang. I tend to speak in very sort of lofty, heady, sort
of idealistic terms. His work is much more practical and is much more of the how-to. And
it really is an amazing companion to sort of my work, and I have deep, deep respect for
him and his writing.
Shawn: And you mentioned some stories in your book about his leadership journey
that—

Simon: Absolutely.

Shawn: Very applicable to the message that you deliver in Leaders Eat Last.

Simon: Yeah.

Shawn: On a lighter note, what song do you listen to repeatedly these days?

Simon: These days, I’m obsessed with the band Alt-J.

Shawn: Ah, yeah, yeah.

Simon: And their album, the Awesome Wave. I’ve sat on flights, and I put that entire
album on repeat. And for three-and-a-half hours, I just listen to one album over and over
and over again. It’s just fantastic.

Shawn: I love it when I find those albums. Pompeii... Bastille is that group for me
right now.

Simon: Oh, I’ll have to check them out.

Shawn: Yeah. Really good group. Morning or evening person?

Simon: Oh, definitely evening.

Shawn: Oh, OK.

Simon: I’m a night owl.

Shawn: OK. Well, thank you for being up early this morning, then. And the last thing,
since the podcast is called Work That Matters, what does doing work that matters mean
to you?

Simon: Doing work that matters is doing work in which you get the joy of seeing
someone else succeed. It’s the joy of seeing someone else realize that they’re capable
of more than they thought they were. That’s work that matters.

Shawn: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, Simon, thank you so much for spending your morning
with us. We appreciate it. Your new book, Leaders Eat Last...

For those who are readers of Switch & Shift and for those who are listeners of this
podcast, this is a book that will resonate deeply with you because it really does look at
our own humanity and explores what it means to eat last, the implications of that to our
leadership, and backed behind it is some great science, some of which we didn’t get a
chance to really explore in this interview. But definitely pick it up. I believe it’s out now.

Simon: It is out now.

Shawn: Yeah, yeah. And by the time this launches, it’ll be up for a couple of weeks,
and you’ll be hot and heavy on the book tour.

Thank you again for taking some time to be with us this morning. We greatly appreciate
it.

Simon: My pleasure.

Shawn: And this is Shawn Murphy with Work That Matters. Take care, everyone.