Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't

Author Simon Sinek is one of my favorite authors. I have been reading and following him since his TED talk in Puget Sound for his book Start with Why. One interesting coincidence that happened with that talk is at one point in the talk, Simon is discussing the Wright Brothers taking flight, and at that moment in the video, you can hear a plane take off. They didn't know it at the time but the sound was picked up by the microphones.

We don’t trust rules, we trust people.

My favorite part of reading Simon's books is that in his storytelling it inspires me to highlight and then follow a concept to other books, papers, talks, etc...

In this book, the focus is on Leadership and how good leaders fulfill the promise made to those in their charge. "The responsibility of a leader is to provide cover from above for their people who are working below."

I have mentioned before that I love the Highlight feature of the Kindle which lets me note interesting ideas and whatever I highlight is then saved into read.amazon.com/notebook for me to access on my computer. When I read Simon Sinek's books it seems that I have more highlights than most other books.

The central theme in Leaders Eat Last is that a leader who is being true to their role, takes care of others and when people in authority focus on externalities they are violating the contract, this results in poor teams, and ultimately poor organizations. "Put simply, the more pressure the leaders of a public company feel to meet the expectations of an outside constituency, the more likely they are to reduce their capacity for better products and services." To make this point even stronger Simon notes, "In fact, the more financial analysts who cover a company, the less innovative the company. According to a 2013 study that appeared in the Journal of Financial Economics, companies covered by a larger number of analysts file fewer patents than companies covered by fewer analysts. And the patents those companies do generally tend to have a lower impact. The evidence supports the idea that “analysts exert too much pressure on managers to meet short-term goals, impeding firms’ investment in long-term innovative projects.”

The more abstract people become, the more capable we are of doing them harm... we are, like Milgram’s volunteers, capable of inhuman behavior. Just like the conditions Milgram set in his experiment, 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. When our relationships with customers or employees become abstract concepts, we naturally pursue the most tangible thing we can see—the metrics.

There are several examples in the book which show that the focus of managers on short term metrics can do serious damage to the team and the company in the long run.

In Joseph Jaffe's book Built to Suck the evidence from the focus on short term goals and disconnection between people and focus on the numbers is clear; "between 2016-2018, 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies had declining revenue in comparison with the prior year. Exhibit B: 447 of the original Fortune 500 companies from 1955 (when the list was first created) are gone. 9 in 10. Let that sink in. Exhibit C: 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies from 2000 have disappeared. 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies from 1990 have disappeared... In 1967, the average lifespan of a company on the Fortune 500 was around 75 years. In 2018, it is less than 15 years."

Responsibility is not doing as we are told, that’s obedience. Responsibility is doing what is right.

Here is the Link to the Amazon book.