Leaders Eat Last. Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Dont

Metadata

• Author: Simon Sinek
• Full Title: Leaders Eat Last. Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Dont

Highlights

• Leaders are the ones who run headfirst into the unknown. They rush toward the danger. They put their own interests aside to protect us or to pull us into the future. Leaders would sooner sacrifice what is theirs to save what is ours. And they would never sacrifice what is ours to save what is theirs. This is what it means to be a leader. It means they choose to go first into danger, headfirst toward the unknown. And when we feel sure they will keep us safe, we will march behind them and work tirelessly to see their visions come to life and proudly call ourselves their followers. (Location 62)
• an organization’s success or failure is based on leadership excellence and not managerial acumen. (Location 75)
• Marine leaders are expected to eat last because the true price of leadership is the willingness to place the needs of others above your own. Great leaders truly care about those they are privileged to lead and understand that the true cost of the leadership privilege comes at the expense of self- interest. (Location 83)
• In his previous book, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon explained that for an organization to be successful its leaders need to understand the true purpose of their organization— the Why. (Location 85)
• it is not enough to know “the Why” of your organization; you must know your people and realize that they are much more than an expendable resource. In short, professional competence is not enough to be a good leader; good leaders must truly care about those entrusted to their care. (Location 88)
• organizations where people share values and are valued succeed over the long term in both good and bad times. (Location 93)
• “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” (Location 95)
• When leaders inspire those they lead, people dream of a better future, invest time and effort in learning more, do more for their organizations and along the way become leaders themselves. A leader who takes care of their people and stays focused on the well- being of the organization can never fail. (Location 96)
• exceptional organizations all have cultures in which the leaders provide cover from above and the people on the ground look out for each other. This is the reason they are willing to push hard and take the kinds of risks they do. And the way any organization can achieve this is with empathy. (Location 197)
• Chapman understood that to earn the trust of people, the leaders of an organization must first treat them like people. To earn trust, he must extend trust. (Location 242)
• “When you have people who trust you, they’re going to do a better job for you to earn or keep that trust.” (Location 255)
• When the people have to manage dangers from inside the organization, the organization itself becomes less able to face the dangers from outside. (Location 295)
• When we have to protect ourselves from each other, the whole organization suffers. But when trust and cooperation thrive internally, we pull together and the organization grows stronger as a result. (Location 297)
• If certain conditions are met and the people inside an organization feel safe among each other, they will work together to achieve things none of them could have ever achieved alone. The result is that their organization towers over their competitors. (Location 309)
• To create cultures that inspire people to give all they have to give simply because they love where they work. (Location 313)
• The cultural norms of the majority of companies and organizations today actually work against our natural biological inclinations. This means that happy, inspired and fulfilled employees are the exception rather than the rule. According to the Deloitte Shift Index, 80 percent of people are dissatisfied with their jobs. (Location 322)
• Every single employee is someone’s son or someone’s daughter. Parents work to offer their children a good life and a good education and to teach them the lessons that will help them grow up to be happy, confident and able to use all the talents they were blessed with. Those parents then hand their children over to a company with the hope the leaders of that company will exercise the same love and care as they have. (Location 343)
• Being a leader is like being a parent, and the company is like a new family to join. One that will care for us like we are their own … in sickness and in health. And if we are successful, our people will take on our company’s name as a sign of the family to which they are loyal. (Location 348)
• Leaders of organizations who create a working environment better suited for how we are designed do not sacrifice excellence or performance simply because they put people first. Quite the contrary. These organizations are among the most stable, innovative and high- performing companies in their industries. (Location 356)
• The leaders of great organizations do not see people as a commodity to be managed to help grow the money. They see the money as the commodity to be managed to help grow their people. This is why performance really matters. The better the organization performs, the more fuel there is to build an even bigger, more robust organization that feeds the hearts and souls of those who work there. (Location 359)
• To see money as subordinate to people and not the other way around is fundamental to creating a culture in which the people naturally pull together to advance the business. (Location 363)
• We need to build more organizations that prioritize the care of human beings. As leaders, it is our sole responsibility to protect our people and, in turn, our people will protect each other and advance the organization together. (Location 373)
• This feeling of belonging, of shared values and a deep sense of empathy, dramatically enhances trust, cooperation and problem solving. (Location 394)
• The ability of a group of people to do remarkable things hinges on how well those people pull together as a team. (Location 406)
• By creating a Circle of Safety around the people in the organization, leadership reduces the threats people feel inside the group, which frees them up to focus more time and energy to protect the organization from the constant dangers outside and seize the big opportunities. Without a Circle of Safety, people are forced to spend too much time and energy protecting themselves from each other. (Location 426)
• the strength and endurance of a company does not come from products or services but from how well their people pull together. Every member of the group plays a role in maintaining the Circle of Safety and it is the leader’s role to ensure that they do. This is the primary role of leadership, to look out for those inside their Circle. (Location 438)
• The standards a leader sets for entry, if based on a clear set of human values, significantly impact people’s sense of belonging and their willingness to pull together and contribute to the team. (Location 445)
• when those inside the bureaucracy work primarily to protect themselves, progress slows and the entire organization becomes more susceptible to external threats and pressures. Only when the Circle of Safety surrounds everyone in the organization, and not just a few people or a department or two, are the benefits fully realized. (Location 451)
• Without the protection of our leaders, everyone outside the inner circle is forced to work alone or in small tribes to protect and advance their own interests. And in so doing, silos form, politics entrench, mistakes are covered up instead of exposed, the spread of information slows and unease soon replaces any sense of cooperation and security. (Location 455)
• Strong leaders, in contrast, extend the Circle of Safety to include every single person who works for the organization. Self- preservation is unnecessary and fiefdoms are less able to survive. (Location 457)
• organization becomes. It is easy to know when we are in the Circle of Safety because we can feel it. We feel valued by our colleagues and we feel cared for by our superiors. We become absolutely confident that the leaders of the organization and all those with whom we work are there for us and will do what they can to help us succeed. We become members of the group. We feel like we belong. (Location 460)
• The whole purpose of maintaining the Circle of Safety is so that we can invest all our time and energy to guard against the dangers outside. (Location 466)
• We cannot tell people to trust us. We cannot instruct people to come up with big ideas. And we certainly can’t demand that people cooperate. These are always results— the results of feeling safe and trusted among the people with whom we work. When the Circle of Safety is strong, we naturally share ideas, share intelligence and share the burdens of stress. (Location 469)
• For the most part, especially for larger organizations, it’s a matter of arithmetic. And sometimes the cost to keep us employed simply falls on the wrong side of the equation. And at many companies, that equation is reevaluated annually, which means every year we are at risk. (Location 512)
• But the myth of job stability may be the least of our concerns. A 2011 study conducted by a team of social scientists at the University of Canberra in Australia concluded that having a job we hate is as bad for our health and sometimes worse than not having a job at all. Levels of depression and anxiety among people who are unhappy at work were the same or greater than those who were unemployed. (Location 514)
• Stress and anxiety at work have less to do with the work we do and more to do with weak management and leadership. (Location 517)
• when our bosses completely ignore us, 40 percent of us actively disengage from our work. If our bosses criticize us on a regular basis, 22 percent of us actively disengage. Meaning, even if we’re getting criticized, we are actually more engaged simply because we feel that at least someone is acknowledging that we exist! (Location 528)
• not caused by a higher degree of responsibility and pressure usually associated with rank. It is not the demands of the job that cause the most stress, but the degree of control workers feel they have throughout their day. The studies also found that the effort required by a job is not in itself stressful, but rather the imbalance between the effort we give and the reward we feel. Put simply: less control, more stress. (Location 541)
• “The more senior you are in the employment hierarchy, the longer you might expect to live compared to people in lower employment grades,” (Location 555)
• A supportive and well- managed work environment is good for one’s health. Those who feel they have more control, who feel empowered to make decisions instead of waiting for approval, suffer less stress. Those only doing as they are told, always forced to follow the rules, are the ones who suffer the most. Our feelings of control, stress, and our ability to perform at our best are all directly tied to how safe we feel in our organizations. (Location 563)
• Feeling unsafe around those we expect to feel safe— those in our tribes (work is the modern version of the tribe)— fundamentally violates the laws of nature and how we were designed to live. (Location 566)
• Some say a weak job market or bad economy is the reason to stick it out, in which case leaders of companies should want to treat their people better during hard times to prevent a mass exodus as soon as things improve. And in a good economy, leaders of companies should also want to treat their people well so that their people will stop at nothing to help the company manage when the hard times return (which, inevitably, they will). The best companies almost always make it through hard times because the people rally to make sure they do. In other words, from a strictly business standpoint, treating people well in any economy is more cost effective than not. (Location 584)
• A study by two researchers at the Graduate School of Social Work at Boston College found that a child’s sense of well- being is affected less by the long hours their parents put in at work and more by the mood their parents are in when they come home. (Location 590)
• When we feel like we belong to the group and trust the people with whom we work, we naturally cooperate to face outside challenges and threats. When we do not have a sense of belonging, however, then we are forced to invest time and energy to protect ourselves from each other. And in so doing, we inadvertently make ourselves more vulnerable to the outside threats and challenges. (Location 623)
• The time we spend getting to know people when we’re not working is part of what it takes to form bonds of trust. It’s the exact same reason why eating together and doing things as a family really matters. (Location 655)
• The more familiar we are with each other, the stronger our bonds. Social interaction is also important for the leaders of an organization. Roaming the halls of the office and engaging with people beyond meetings really matters. (Location 657)
• The first two chemicals, endorphins and dopamine, work to get us where we need to go as individuals— to persevere, find food, build shelters, invent tools, drive forward and get things done. I like to call these the “selfish” chemicals. The other two, serotonin and oxytocin, are there to incentivize us to work together and develop feelings of trust and loyalty. I like to call these the “selfless” chemicals. They work to help strengthen our social bonds so that we are more likely to work together and to cooperate, so that we can ultimately survive and ensure our progeny will live on beyond us. (Location 694)
• Two chemicals— endorphins and dopamine— are the reason that we are driven to hunt, gather and achieve. They make us feel good when we find something we’re looking for, build something we need or accomplish our goals. These are the chemicals of progress. (Location 709)
• ENDORPHINS SERVE ONE purpose and one purpose only: to mask physical pain. That’s it. Think of endorphins as our own personal opiate. Often released in response to stress or fear, they mask physical pain with pleasure. The experience of a “runner’s high,” the feeling of euphoria many athletes experience during or after a hard workout, is in fact the endorphin chemical surging through their veins. (Location 712)
• This is one of the reasons runners and other endurance athletes continue to push their bodies harder and harder. It is not simply because they have the discipline to do so; they do it because it actually feels good. They love and sometimes crave the amazing high they can achieve from a hard workout. The biological reason for endorphins, however, has nothing to do with exercise. It has to do with survival. (Location 715)
• We can actually develop a craving for endorphins. That’s why people who are in the habit of regular exercise sometimes crave going for a run or getting to the gym to help them relax, especially after a stressful day at work. Our ancestors probably wanted to go hunting and gathering not simply because they knew they had to, but because it often felt good to go. Again, the human body wants us to feel good when we go looking for food or when we are doing the hard work of building shelter so that we will more likely do it. (Location 723)
• In this day and age, we basically get our endorphin hits from exercise or manual labor. (Location 728)
• Stephen Colbert, political satirist and host of The Colbert Report, commented during an interview on the importance of laughter in tense times. “You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time,” he said. (Location 729)
• Laughing actually releases endorphins. They are released to mask the pain we’re causing to ourselves as our organs are being convulsed. We like laughing for the same reason runners like running— it feels good. (Location 731)
• During tense times, a little lightheartedness may go a long way to help relax those around us and reduce tensions so that we can focus on getting our jobs done. (Location 735)
• DOPAMINE IS THE reason for the good feeling we get when we find something we’re looking for or do something that needs to get done. It is responsible for the feeling of satisfaction after we’ve finished an important task, completed a project, reached a goal or even reached one of the markers on our way to a bigger goal. We all know how good it feels to cross something off our to- do list. That feeling of progress or accomplishment is primarily because of dopamine. (Location 740)
• It is dopamine that makes us a goal- oriented species with a bias for progress. When we are given a task to complete, a metric to reach, as long as we can see it or clearly imagine it in our mind’s eye, we will get a little burst of dopamine to get us on our way. (Location 746)
• As we get closer to our goals, the metrics tell us we’re making progress and we get another little hit to keep us going. Then finally, when we reach our goal, that intense feeling of “got it” is a big hit of dopamine, our biological reward for all that hard work. Each milestone we pass is a metric, a way to see that the fruit tree is getting closer and closer. (Location 752)
• Obviously the bigger the goal, the more effort it requires, the more dopamine we get. This is why it feels really good to work hard to accomplish something difficult, while doing something quick and easy may only give us a little hit if anything at all. In other words, it feels good to put in a lot of effort to accomplish something. (Location 756)
• “If you don’t write down your goals,” so the saying goes, “you won’t accomplish them.” There is some truth to this. Like seeing that fruit- filled tree in the distance, if we are able to physically see what we are setting out to accomplish or clearly imagine it, then we are indeed, thanks to the powers of dopamine, more likely to accomplish that goal. (Location 763)
• This is the reason we like to be given a clear goal to achieve to receive a bonus instead of being given some amorphous instructions. It’s not very motivating or helpful to be told that we will receive a performance bonus if we achieve “more.” How much more? Give us something specific to set our sights on, something we can measure our progress toward, and we are more likely to achieve (Location 766)
• It is also the reason why a corporate vision statement must be something we can see in our mind’s eye. That’s why it’s called a “vision,” because we need to be able to “see” it. (Location 770)
• good vision statement, in contrast, explains, in specific terms, what the world would look like if everything we did was wildly successful. (Location 775)
• if we find that vision inspiring and worthy of our time and energy, then we can more easily plan the steps we need to take to achieve that vision. Short or long term, the clearer we can see what we are setting out to achieve, the more likely we are to achieve it. It’s exciting, thanks to dopamine. This is why the best visions offer us something that, for all practical purposes, we will never actually reach, but for which we would gladly die trying. Each point in our journey is an opportunity to feel like we’re making progress toward something bigger than ourselves. (Location 778)
• Cocaine, nicotine, alcohol and gambling all release dopamine. And the feeling can be intoxicating. The chemical effects notwithstanding, the addictions we have to these things (and lots of other things that feel good) are all basically dopamine addictions. (Location 786)
• social media. Texting, e- mail, the number of likes we collect, the ding, the buzz or the flash of our phones that tell us “You’ve got mail,” feels amazing. As it should. We have associated the dopamine- releasing feeling of “ooh, something for me” with getting a text or e- mail or the like. (Location 790)
• It is said that if you wake up in the morning and the first thing you crave is a drink, you might be an alcoholic. If you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is check your phone to read e- mail or scan through your social media before you even get out of bed, you might be an addict. Craving a hit of chemical feel good, we repeat the behaviors that we know can produce that hit. In the case of alcohol or gambling, we are aware of it. In the case of our love of our devices and social media, we are less aware of the addictive qualities. (Location 794)
• Without endorphins to give us the edge we need to keep going, we would not keep striving even when we were tired and exhausted. Dopamine rewards us with a chemical rush when we’ve accomplished something, making us want to do it again and again, which is exactly what it takes to find things, build things and get things done. But it’s harder to do all things alone, especially the big things. Together is better. (Location 811)
• There to encourage pro- social behavior, serotonin and oxytocin help us form bonds of trust and friendship so that we will look out for each other. It is because of these two chemicals that we have societies and cultures. And it is because of these chemicals that we pull together to accomplish much bigger things than if we were to face the world alone. (Location 832)
• when we find ourselves inside a Circle of Safety, stress declines, fulfillment rises, our want to serve others increases and our willingness to trust others to watch our backs skyrockets. When these social incentives are inhibited, however, we become more selfish and more aggressive. (Location 837)
• The strength of the culture, and not its size or resources, determines an organization’s ability to adapt to the times, overcome adversity and pioneer new innovations. When the conditions are right, when a strong Circle of Safety is present and felt by all, we do what we do best. We act in the manner for which we are designed. (Location 846)
• Serotonin is the feeling of pride. It is the feeling we get when we perceive that others like or respect us. It makes us feel strong and confident, like we can take on anything. And more than confidence boosting, it raises our status. (Location 853)
• As social animals, we more than want the approval of those in our tribe, we need it. It really matters. We all want to feel valuable for the effort we put forth for the good of others in the group or the group itself. (Location 857)
• Whether we are a boss, coach or parent, serotonin is working to encourage us to serve those for whom we are directly responsible. And if we are the employee, player or the one being looked after, the serotonin encourages us to work hard to make them proud. (Location 887)
• Those who work hardest to help others succeed will be seen by the group as the leader or the “alpha” of the group. And being the alpha— the strong, supportive one of the group, the one willing to sacrifice time and energy so that others may gain— is a prerequisite for leadership. (Location 889)
• OXYTOCIN IS MOST people’s favorite chemical. It’s the feeling of friendship, love or deep trust. It is the feeling we get when we’re in the company of our closest friends or trusted colleagues. It is the feeling we get when we do something nice for someone or someone does something nice for us. It is responsible for all the warm and fuzzies. (Location 893)
• Without oxytocin, we wouldn’t want to perform acts of generosity. Without oxytocin there would be no empathy. Without oxytocin, we wouldn’t be able to develop strong bonds of trust and friendship. (Location 896)
• Oxytocin is the chemical that helps direct how vulnerable we can afford to make ourselves. It is a social compass that determines when it’s safe to open up and trust or when we should hold back. (Location 904)
• Unlike dopamine, which is about instant gratification, oxytocin is long- lasting. The more time we spend with someone, the more we are willing to make ourselves vulnerable around them. As we learn to trust them and earn their trust in return, the more oxytocin flows. In time, as if by magic, we will realize that we have developed a deep bond with this person. The madness and excitement and spontaneity of the dopamine hit is replaced by a more relaxed, more stable, more long- term oxytocin- driven relationship. (Location 906)
• My favorite definition of love is giving someone the power to destroy us and trusting they won’t use it. (Location 910)
• As much as we want to stand out and consider ourselves individuals, at our core, we are herd animals that are biologically designed to find comfort when we feel like we belong to a group. Our brains are wired to release oxytocin when in the presence of our tribe and cortisol, the chemical that produces the feeling of anxiety, when we feel vulnerable and alone. (Location 915)
• To be around others like us makes us feel like we belong and gives us a sense of safety. We feel accepted as part of the group and no longer suffer the anxiety of feeling like we are on the edges. There are few feelings that human beings crave more than a sense of belonging … the feeling of being inside a Circle of Safety. (Location 921)
• Simply seeing or hearing about acts of human generosity actually inspires us to want to do the same. (Location 933)
• This is one of the reasons we find movies or news stories of incredible selfless acts so inspiring. This is the power of oxytocin. It actually makes us good people. The more good things we do, the more good we want to do. This is the science behind “paying it forward.” (Location 935)
• Oxytocin is also released with physical contact. That warm feeling we get when we hug someone we like for a few seconds longer— that’s oxytocin. It is also the reason it feels nice to hold hands with someone and the reason young children seem to always want to touch and hug their mothers. (Location 937)
• there’s lots of evidence that children who are deprived of human contact, deprived of sufficient doses of oxytocin, have trouble building trusting relationships later in life. It is also part of the reinforcing bond between athletes, for example, when they high- five, fist- bump or smack each other. It reinforces the bond they share and the commitment they have to work together for their common goal. (Location 939)
• Oxytocin really is magical stuff. Not only is it behind the feelings of trust and loyalty, it also makes us feel good and inspires us to do nice things for others. (Location 951)
• Oxytocin boosts our immune systems, makes us better problem solvers and makes us more resistant to the addictive qualities of dopamine. Unlike dopamine, which is largely responsible for instant gratification, oxytocin gives us lasting feelings of calm and safety. (Location 958)
• Cortisol is not supposed to stay in our systems; it is supposed to fire off when we sense a threat and then leave when the threat has passed. And for good reason. The stress on our bodies is serious. The manner in which it reconfigures our internal systems can cause lasting damage if we have to live in a perpetual sense of fear or anxiety. (Location 997)
• Unfortunately, many of us work in environments where members of the group don’t care much about one another’s fate. Which means that valuable information, like impending danger, is often kept secret. As a result, bonds of trust among employees or between leaders and workers are weak, if they exist at all. We are left almost without an option but to put ourselves first. (Location 1023)
• cortisol actually inhibits the release of oxytocin, the chemical responsible for empathy. This means that when there is only a weak Circle of Safety and people must invest time and energy to guard against politics and other dangers inside the company, it actually makes us even more selfish and less concerned about one another or the organization. (Location 1030)
• constant flow of cortisol isn’t just bad for organizations. It can also do serious damage to our health. Like the other selfish chemicals, cortisol can help us survive, but it isn’t supposed to be in our system all the time. It wreaks havoc with our glucose metabolism. It also increases blood pressure and inflammatory responses and impairs cognitive ability. (Location 1042)
• Cortisol increases aggression, suppresses our sex drive and generally leaves us feeling stressed out. And here’s the killer— literally. Cortisol prepares our bodies to react suddenly— to fight or run as circumstances demand. Because this takes a lot of energy, when we feel threatened, our bodies turn off nonessential functions, such as digestion and growth. Once the stress has passed, these systems are turned on again. Unfortunately, the immune system is one of the functions that the body deems nonessential, so it shuts down during cortisol bursts. In other words, if we work in environments in which trust is low, relationships are weak or transactional and stress and anxiety are normal, we become much more vulnerable to illness. (Location 1045)
• If we work in an environment in which leadership tells the truth, in which layoffs are not the default in hard times and in which incentive structures do not pit us against one another, the result, thanks to the increased levels of oxytocin and serotonin, is trust and cooperation. (Location 1064)
• safe. If we feel safe at home, but we don’t feel safe at work, then we will suffer what we perceive to be a work- life imbalance. If we have strong relationships at home and at work, if we feel like we belong, if we feel protected in both, then the powerful forces of a magical chemical like oxytocin can diminish the effect of stress and cortisol. With trust, we do things for each other, look out for each other and sacrifice for each other. (Location 1067)
• “Firing is an easy option,” Kim says. “Tough love, coaching, even a program to help people find a job somewhere else if they decide our company is not for them are all much more effective, but require much more time and attention from the company.” (Location 1090)
• When the time is taken to build proper relationships and when leaders choose to put their people before their numbers, when we can actually feel a sense of trust for each other, the oxytocin released in our bodies can reverse many of the negative effects of operating in a high- stress, cortisol- soaked environment. (Location 1110)
• it’s not the nature of the work we do or the number of hours we work that will help us reduce stress and achieve work- life balance; it’s increased amounts of oxytocin and serotonin. Serotonin boosts our self- confidence and inspires us to help those who work for us and make proud those for whom we work. Oxytocin relieves stress, increases our interest in our work and improves our cognitive abilities, making us better able to solve complex problems. (Location 1113)
• Those who don’t embrace the values that define the culture may feel the cortisol in their bodies telling them that they don’t belong. Feeling the anxiety of being an outsider in the group, they may decide to leave to find a place in which they are a better fit. The others, in contrast, will feel safe among their colleagues. They will feel like they have found a home. (Location 1123)
• Companies and organizations are our modern tribes. Like any tribe, they have traditions and symbols and language. The culture of a company is like the culture of any tribe. Some have strong cultures and some have weak cultures. We feel like we belong to some more than others, that we more easily “click” with the people in one culture over another. And, like all tribes, some have strong leaders and some have weak leaders. But they all have leaders. (Location 1137)
• scientists— Francesca Gino of Chapel Hill, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke— showed that people who wear phony couture clothing actually don’t feel the same burst of pride or status as those who wear the real thing. Faking it, it turns out, makes us feel phony, as if we are cheating. Status is biological, we have to earn it to feel it. The same study also concluded that those who attempted to cheat their biology were actually more inclined to cheat in other aspects of their lives as well. (Location 1174)
• for many of the overpaid leaders, we know that they took the money and perks and didn’t offer protection to their people. In some cases, they even sacrificed their people to protect or boost their own interests. This is what so viscerally offends us. We only accuse them of greed and excess when we feel they have violated the very definition of what it means to be a leader. (Location 1195)
• Leadership is the choice to serve others with or without any formal rank. There are people with authority who are not leaders and there are people at the bottom rungs of an organization who most certainly are leaders. (Location 1216)
• Leaders are the ones who are willing to give up something of their own for us. Their time, their energy, their money, maybe even the food off their plate. When it matters, leaders choose to eat last. (Location 1221)
• those who aim to raise their own status simply so they can enjoy the perks themselves without fulfilling their responsibilities as leaders are, plain and simple, weak leaders. Though they may achieve alpha status and rise in the ranks, though they may possess talents and strengths that could earmark them for alpha status, they only become leaders when they accept the responsibility to protect those in their care. If they choose to sacrifice those in their tribe for personal gain, however, they will often struggle to hold on to their position once they’ve got it. Again, the group is not stupid. The people always have the power. (Location 1223)
• The leaders of organizations who rise through the ranks not because they want it, but because the tribe keeps offering higher status out of gratitude for their willingness to sacrifice, are the true leaders worthy of our trust and loyalty. (Location 1228)
• All leaders, even the good ones, can sometimes lose their way and become selfish and power hungry, however. Intoxicated by the chemicals, they can sometimes forget that their responsibility as a leader is to their people. (Location 1229)
• What makes a good leader is that they eschew the spotlight in favor of spending time and energy to do what they need to do to support and protect their people. And when we feel the Circle of Safety around us, we offer our blood and sweat and tears and do everything we can to see our leader’s vision come to life. (Location 1232)
• “All the perks, all the benefits and advantages you may get for the rank or position you hold, they aren’t meant for you. They are meant for the role you fill. And when you leave your role, which eventually you will, they will give the ceramic cup to the person who replaces you. Because you only ever deserved a Styrofoam cup.” (Location 1252)
• work. Our ability to work hard and muscle through hard labor is thanks to endorphins. (Location 1286)
• Our ability to set goals, focus and get things done comes from the incentivizing powers of dopamine. It feels good to make progress, and so we do. (Location 1286)
• Serotonin is responsible for the pride we feel when those we care for achieve great things or when we make proud the people who take care of us. Serotonin helps to ensure we look out for those who follow us and do right by those who lead us. And the mysterious power of oxytocin helps us form bonds of love and trust. It helps us form relationships so strong we can make decisions with complete confidence that those who care about us will stand by our side. We know that if we need help or support the people who care about us will be there for us, no matter what. Oxytocin keeps us healthy. (Location 1287)
• The selfish chemicals, endorphins and dopamine, give us short- term rewards to which we can, under the right conditions, become addicted. The selfless chemicals, serotonin and oxytocin, take time to build up in our systems before we can enjoy their full benefits. Though we may enjoy the thrill of reaching a goal or winning a race, that feeling won’t last. To get more of that feeling we need to win another race and reach a more distant goal. The bonds of love and trust and friendship take time to feel. (Location 1295)
• Any motivation we have is a function of our desire to repeat behaviors that make us feel good or avoid stress or pain. The only thing we can do is create environments in which the right chemicals are released for the right reasons. And if we get the environment right, if we create organizational cultures that work to the natural inclinations of the human animal, the result will be an entire group of self- motivated people. (Location 1300)
• The responsibility of leaders is to teach their people the rules, train them to gain competency and build their confidence. At that point, leadership must step back and trust that their people know what they are doing and will do what needs to be done. (Location 1368)
• In weak organizations, without oversight, too many people will break the rules for personal gain. That’s what makes the organizations weak. In strong organizations, people will break the rules because it is the right thing to do for others. (Location 1369)
• The responsibility of a leader is to provide cover from above for their people who are working below. (Location 1376)
• If good people are asked to work in a bad culture, one in which leaders do not relinquish control, then the odds of something bad happening go up. People will be more concerned about following the rules out of fear of getting in trouble or losing their jobs than doing what needs to be done. And when that happens, souls will be lost. (Location 1379)
• Our intelligence gives us ideas and instructions. But it is our ability to cooperate that actually helps us get those things done. Nothing of real value on this earth was built by one person without the help of others. (Location 1400)
• To a social animal, trust is like lubrication. It reduces friction and creates conditions much more conducive to performance, (Location 1425)
• It’s not how smart the people in the organization are; it’s how well they work together that is the true indicator of future success or the ability to manage through struggle. (Location 1427)
• The generation that grew up during some of the worst economic times in the country came of age just in time to be drafted and shipped off to do battle with Hitler’s armies. The entire country went straight from the Great Depression into a great war. (Location 1467)
• the impulse of a new generation to change everything and the desire of an older generation to keep things the same work like a system of checks and balances. It offers a natural tension that helps to ensure we don’t break everything while also allowing us to make progress and change with the times. (Location 1501)
• Returning from war, people celebrated. And celebrated. And celebrated. And nine months later, there began a period of population growth never seen before in the United States: the Baby Boom. (Location 1507)
• Unlike their parents, who were raised during a time of economic depression and war rations, the Boomers were raised in times of rising affluence and prosperity. Starting at the end of the war, wealth and GDP in America did nothing but grow at a steady pace. (Location 1515)
• Whereas the Greatest Generation was defined by the need to serve others, the Boomer generation started on a path of taking for themselves. As our wealth and attitudes changed, we started to transform from a country that would fight to protect a way of life into a country that would fight to protect the way we prefer to live. (Location 1518)
• When the Boomers were young, it was they who forced civil rights on an older generation bent on maintaining an unhealthy and unjust status quo. It was, indeed, the young Boomers who demanded better pay for women and refused to blindly accept the injustices that prevailed in our society. (Location 1530)
• Forget the status quo— the Boomers aspired to self- realization. Having a spiritual guru was like going to the gym today. They learned to disco. They wore polyester. And they sealed their reputation as the generation that defined, as Thomas Wolfe described in a 1976 issue of New York magazine, the “Me” decade. They became a group that seemed to be more concerned about their own happiness and well- being than the happiness or well- being of those around them. (Location 1540)
• We no longer needed to go to work to have power— we could have power alone at home too. The individual could compete against the corporation. Even the new technologies of the day supported the desire for more individualism. (Location 1576)
• Other inventions of the 1980s included the disposable camera and disposable contact lenses. Disposability, another symptom of our excess, was now an industry to be pioneered. We were actually looking for more things we could throw out. And there was one other thing we started to view as disposable: people. (Location 1579)
• on August 5, 1981, President Reagan fired 11,359 air traffic controllers, nearly every controller working for the FAA at the time. And it didn’t stop there. (Location 1596)
• In an attempt to alleviate one short- term strain on our country, President Reagan inadvertently created a new, longer- lasting one. By firing all the air traffic controllers, he sent a message to business leaders across the nation. He unwittingly blessed the swift and even aggressive decision to use mass layoffs to guard against a short- term economic disruption. Though I am certain Reagan never intended it as such, some eager CEOs interpreted his actions as permission for them to do the same. (Location 1604)
• With the tacit approval from on high, the practice of laying off people in mass numbers to balance the books started to happen with greater frequency. Layoffs had existed before the eighties, but usually as a last resort and not an early option. We were now entering a time in which even meritocracy mattered less. How hard someone worked or how much they sacrificed or contributed to the company no longer necessarily translated into job stability. Now anyone could be laid off simply to help balance the books for that year. (Location 1609)
• Better products, services and experiences are usually the result of the employees who invented, innovated or supplied them. As soon as people are put second on the priority list, differentiation gives way to commoditization. And when that happens, innovation declines and the pressure to compete on things like price, and other short- term strategies, goes up. (Location 1631)
• 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.” 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. (Location 1636)
• When we have less, we tend to be more open to sharing what we have. A Bedouin tribe or nomadic Mongolian family doesn’t have much, yet they are happy to share because it is in their interest to do so. If you happen upon them in your travels, they will open up their homes and give you their food and hospitality. (Location 1647)
• Ironically, the more we have, the bigger our fences, the more sophisticated our security to keep people away and the less we want to share. Our desire for more, combined with our reduced physical interaction with the “common folk,” starts to create a disconnection or blindness to reality. (Location 1651)
• new set of values and norms has been established for our businesses and our society— a system of dopamine- driven performance that rewards us for individual achievement at the expense of the balancing effects of serotonin and oxytocin that reward us for working together and building bonds of trust and loyalty. (Location 1654)
• The big Boomer generation has, by accident, created a world quite out of balance. And imbalance, as history has proven over and over, will self- correct suddenly and aggressively unless we are smart enough to correct it ourselves slowly and methodically. (Location 1660)
• The problem now is that we have produced an abundance of nearly everything we need or want. And we don’t do well with abundance. It can short- circuit our systems and actually do damage to us and to our organizations. Abundance can be destructive not because it is bad for us, per se. Abundance can be destructive because it abstracts the value of things. The more we have, the less we seem to value what we’ve got. And if the abstraction of stuff makes us value it less, imagine what it does to our relationships. (Location 1675)
• The scale at which we are able to operate today is sometimes too big for us to wrap our heads around. By its very nature, scale creates distance, and at distance, human concepts start losing their meaning. A consumer is just that: an abstraction of a person who we hope will consume whatever we have to offer. (Location 1678)
• We no longer see each other as people; we are now customers, shareholders, employees, avatars, online profiles, screen names, e- mail addresses and expenses to be tracked. The human being really has gone virtual. Now more than ever, we are trying to work and live, be productive and happy, in a world in which we are strangers to those around us. (Location 1686)
• 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. The more abstract people become, the more capable we are of doing them harm. (Location 1782)
• Leaders who put a premium on numbers over lives are, more often than not, physically separated from the people they serve. (Location 1797)
• Uncertainty, silos and politics— all of which thrive in a command- and- control culture and work counter to the concept of a Circle of Safety— increase our stress and hurt our ability to form relationships to the point where self- preservation becomes our primary focus. (Location 1802)
• When we do not feel safe from each other in the environments in which we work, our instincts drive us to protect ourselves at all costs instead of sharing accountability for our actions. (Location 1814)
• “THERE IS ONE and only one social responsibility of business,” said Milton Friedman in 1970, six years before winning the Nobel Prize in Economics, “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.” (Location 1820)
• Over and over, companies demonstrate a preference for adhering to the letter of the law in their aim to drive profit over any moral responsibility they may have to people they serve or the country or economy within which they operate. (Location 1825)
• too many leaders of companies prefer to obey the scientist instead of a higher moral authority. They can justify their actions as within the law while ignoring the intention of the laws they aim to uphold. (Location 1827)
• As one of the great innovators of our day, the technique Apple pioneered of routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands then to the Caribbean to avoid American taxes has been copied by many other companies since. (Location 1833)
• Simply following the law means we should trust cheating boyfriends or girlfriends because they broke no laws of marriage. As social animals morality also matters. (Location 1838)
• It seems to be the standard for doing business today— to exploit the loopholes until the rules catch up (and sometimes lobby against changing the rules). (Location 1845)
• Being a company of high moral standing is the same as being a person of high moral character— a standard not easily determined by the law but easily felt by anyone. (Location 1870)
• when a leader embraces their responsibility to care for people instead of caring for numbers, then people will follow, solve problems and see to it that that leader’s vision comes to life the right way, a stable way and not the expedient way. (Location 1880)
• one of the shortcomings of using numbers to represent people. At some point, the numbers lose their connection to the people and become just numbers, void of meaning. (Location 1918)
• Be it a politician or someone working in a company, perhaps the most valuable thing we can do if we are to truly serve our constituents is to know them personally. (Location 1927)
• An online community gives shy people a chance to be heard, but the flip side is it also allows some to act out in ways they probably never would in real life. People say horrible things to each other online, things they probably would never say in person. (Location 1947)
• We like to actually be around people who are like us. It makes us feel like we belong. It is also the reason a video conference can never replace a business trip. Trust is not formed through a screen, it is formed across a table. It takes a handshake to bind humans … and no technology yet can replace that. There is no such thing as virtual trust. (Location 1956)
• Real, live human interaction is how we feel a part of something, develop trust and have the capacity to feel for others. It is how we innovate. It is why telecommuters never really feel like they are a part of the team as strongly as the ones who go to work every day. No matter how many e- mails they send or receive, no matter how kept in the loop they are, they are missing all the social time, the gaps, the nuance … the humanity of being around other humans. (Location 1964)
• Gore concluded that to maintain the sense of camaraderie and teamwork he felt was essential for the factory to run smoothly, it should have only about 150 people. That was the magic number. (Location 1981)
• Professor Dunbar figured out that people simply cannot maintain more than about 150 close relationships. “Putting it another way,” he likes to say, “it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.” (Location 1989)
• The earliest groups of Homo sapiens lived in hunter/ gather tribes that maxed out between 100 to 150 people. Amish and Hutterite communities are about 150 in size. The Bushmen of South Africa and Native Americans also live in groups that cap out at about 150. Even the size of a company of Marines is about 150 people. That magical number is the number of close relationships we are naturally designed to manage. (Location 1991)
• when groups get bigger than about 150, the people are less likely to work hard and less likely to help each other out. (Location 2000)
• When a leader is able to personally know everyone in the group, the responsibility for their care becomes personal. The leader starts to see those for whom they are responsible as if they were their own family. Likewise, those in the group start to express ownership of their leader. In a Marine platoon of about forty people, for example, they will often refer to the officer as “our” lieutenant. Whereas the more distant and less seen senior officer is simply “the” colonel. (Location 2012)
• for larger organizations, the only way to manage the scale and keep the Circle of Safety strong is to rely on hierarchies. A CEO can “care” about their people in the abstract, but not until that abstraction is mitigated can the care be real. The only way to truly manage at scale is to empower the levels of management. They can no longer be seen as managers who handle or control people. Instead, managers must become leaders in their own right, which means they must take responsibility for the care and protection of those in their charge, confident that their leaders will take care of them. (Location 2017)
• As social animals, it is imperative for us to see the actual, tangible impact of our time and effort for our work to have meaning and for us to be motivated to do it even better. (Location 2049)
• When we are able to physically see the positive impact of the decisions we make or the work we do, not only do we feel that our work was worth it, but it also inspires us to work harder and do more. (Location 2050)
• Money is an abstraction of tangible resources or human effort. It is a promissory note for future goods or services. Unlike the time and effort that people spend on something, it is what money represents that gives it its value. And as an abstraction, it has no “real” value to our primitive brains, which judge the real value of food and shelter or the behavior of others against the level of protection or safety they can offer us. (Location 2084)
• Given our obsessive need to feel safe among those in our tribe— our communities and our companies— we inherently put a premium value on those who give us their time and energy. Whereas money has relative value ($100toacollegestudentisalot,$ 100 to a millionaire is a little), time and effort have an absolute value. No matter how rich or poor someone is, or where or when they are born, we all have 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year. If someone is willing to give us something of which they have a fixed and finite amount, a completely nonredeemable commodity, we perceive greater value. (Location 2088)
• Just as a parent can’t buy the love of their children with gifts, a company can’t buy the loyalty of their employees with salaries and bonuses. What produces loyalty, that irrational willingness to commit to the organization even when offered more money elsewhere, is the feeling that the leaders of the company would be willing, when it matters, to sacrifice their time and energy to help us. We will judge a boss who spends time after hours to help us as more valuable than a boss who simply gives us a bonus when we hit a target. (Location 2101)
• Giving time and energy actually does more to impact the impression others have of us than giving money. (Location 2111)
• A leader of an organization can’t simply pay their managers to look out for those in their report. A leader can, however, offer their time and energy to those in their care, and in turn those managers would be more willing to give their time and energy to their subordinates. Then their subordinates would, in turn, be more inclined to give time and energy to their direct reports. And, at the end of the chain, the people with outward- facing jobs are more likely to treat the customer better. (Location 2114)
• The strong positive feeling we may have after a great first date, or even a great job interview is not love or trust. It’s a predominantly dopamine- fueled feeling telling us that we think we’ve found what we’re looking for. Because it feels good, we can sometimes mislabel it as something more stable than it is, even if both parties feel it. (Location 2129)
• For 40,000 years, we lived in a predominantly subsistence economy. We rarely had significantly more than we needed. It was only about 10,000 years ago, when we first became farmers instead of hunters and gatherers, that we started to move into a surplus economy. (Location 2148)
• “Destructive Abundance” is what I call the result of this imbalance. It is what happens when selfish pursuits are out of balance with selfless pursuits. When the levels of dopamine- incentivized behaviors overwhelm the social protections afforded by the other chemicals. When protecting the results is prioritized above protecting those who produce the results. Destructive Abundance happens when the players focus almost exclusively on the score and forget why they set out to play the game in the first place. (Location 2156)
• “LONG- TERM GREEDY.” These were the words Gustave “Gus” Levy, the venerable senior partner at Goldman Sachs, would use to describe the way the company operated. (Location 2171)
• Goldman bankers were known as “billionaire Boy Scouts” for their seeming desire to always try to do the right thing for clients. “Long- term greedy” meant that sometimes it was worth taking a short- term hit to help a client because the loyalty and trust it produced would in time pay back in spades. And pay back it did. (Location 2173)
• Starting in the 1990s, and certainly accelerating after the company went public in 1999, there’s evidence that the partnership culture started to break down. The time was ripe for a new mentality to take hold at Goldman. “The regulations that had kept finance boring had all but disappeared by the time Goldman’s IPO was issued,” wrote Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig in a column for CNN.com. “Bold (and sometimes reckless) experiments (‘ financial innovations’) created incredible opportunities for firms like Goldman to profit.” (Location 2187)
• When we don’t have a sense of belonging, we wear a T- shirt stamped with the company logo to sleep in or while painting the house. When we have a sense of belonging, however, we wear the company schwag in public and with pride. (Location 2215)
• A company of strong character will have a culture that promotes treating all people well, not just the ones who pay them or earn them money in the moment. In a culture of strong character, the people inside the company will feel protected by their leaders and feel that their colleagues have their backs. In a culture of weak character, the people will feel that any protection they have comes primarily from their own ability to manage the politics, promote their own successes and watch their own backs (though some are lucky enough to have a colleague or two to help). (Location 2229)
• “the feeling was ‘I don’t want anybody to know as much as I do because then I am expendable.’” This is a behavior designed for nothing but self- preservation. It is a classic symptom of a cortisol- rich, unsafe culture where valuable information is hidden to advance or protect an individual or a small group of individuals even though sharing would benefit the others in the group and the organization as a whole. (Location 2288)
• Innovation at 3M is not simply the result of educational pedigree or technical expertise. Innovation is the result of a corporate culture of collaboration and sharing. In stark contrast to the mind- set of leaders at some investment banks, 3M knows that people do their best work when they work together, share their ideas and comfortably borrow each other’s work for their own projects. There’s no notion of “mine.” (Location 2315)
• “We never throw an idea away because you never know when someone else will need it.” The cross- pollination of ideas— combined with an emphasis on sharing across product lines— has led to an atmosphere of collaboration that makes 3M a place where employees feel valued. (Location 2319)
• “Innovation from interaction,” is one of the company’s favorite mottos. Employees are encouraged to present new ideas at internal Tech Forums, regular gatherings of peers from other divisions. (Location 2321)
• If everyday products had a “3M inside” sticker on them like computers had an “Intel inside” sticker, the average consumer would see that sticker sixty to seventy times a day. (Location 2334)
• Inside a Circle of Safety, when people trust and share their successes and failures, what they know and what they don’t know, the result is innovation. (Location 2338)
• Leadership Lesson 2: So Goes the Leader, so Goes the Culture (Location 2341)
• O’Neal wanted to do away with Merrill Lynch’s employee- centric culture, something he saw as an obstacle. Affectionately known as “Mother Merrill” (a hint to the days when the culture was more balanced and human), Merrill Lynch was a great place to work. It was no secret, however, that O’Neal despised the culture, viewing it as soft and unfocused, something that got in his way. With no interest in fostering any particular healthy corporate culture, the business was all about competition, and a competitive atmosphere is, indeed, what he created. (Location 2362)
• We work to advance the vision of a leader who inspires us and we work to undermine a dictator who means to control us. (Location 2376)
• O’Neal represented an extreme version of the thinking that had taken over Wall Street, and in the end it caused his downfall. He had isolated himself from the people he led and, making matters worse, he had so successfully fostered internal competition that, not surprisingly, those who had once been on his team turned against him. (Location 2394)
• The more attention a leader focuses on their own wealth or power, they stop acting like a leader and start taking on more of the attributes of a tyrant. (Location 2398)
• the tyrant leader “exists only to preserve his wealth and power.” And this is the problem. “Power,” as Bowden further explains, “gradually shuts the tyrant off from the world.” And, as we already know, when distance is created, abstraction settles in and soon after that comes the paranoia. The tyrant sees the world against them, which only compels them to shut out even more people. They set up more and more rigid controls around their inner circle. And as their isolation increases, the organization suffers. (Location 2400)
• If a leader were purely evil or if we believed there was no chance to enter their inner Circle, then the seeds of rebellion would form. But when the possibility exists that we might make it in, or if, on the other hand, we are unsure whether we will be thrown to the wolves, we become almost immobilized. It is the rustle in the grass, the fear of what may be lurking, that initiates the flow of cortisol into our blood streams. (Location 2406)
• “What happens when the leader is wrong in a top- down culture? Everyone goes off a cliff,” Captain Marquet would later write. (Location 2461)
• “Those at the top,” explains Captain Marquet, “have all the authority and none of the information. Those at the bottom,” he continues, “have all the information and none of the authority. Not until those without information relinquish their control can an organization run better, smoother and faster and reach its maximum potential.” (Location 2469)
• Captain Marquet came to understand that the role of the leader is not to bark commands and be completely accountable for the success or failure of the mission. It is a leader’s job instead to take responsibility for the success of each member of his crew. It is the leader’s job to ensure that they are well trained and feel confident to perform their duties. To give them responsibility and hold them accountable to advance the mission. (Location 2479)
• In his book, Turn the Ship Around!, Captain Marquet goes through all the specific steps he took— that any organization can take— to develop an environment in which those who know more, the people who are actually doing the work, are empowered to make decisions. (Location 2483)
• He literally banned the words “permission to” aboard the Santa Fe. “Sir, request permission to submerge the ship.” “Permission granted.” “Aye- aye, Sir. Submerging the ship.” This standard way of operating was replaced with simply, “Sir, I intend to submerge the ship.” The chain of command remained intact. The only difference was a psychological shift. (Location 2486)
• Captain Marquet is quick to point out that there are only three things that he can’t delegate. “I can’t delegate my legal responsibilities, I can’t delegate my relationships and I can’t delegate my knowledge. Everything else, however, I can ask others to take responsibility for,” he says. (Location 2491)
• that’s what the best leaders do. They share what they know, ask knowledgeable people for help performing their duties and make introductions to create new relationships within their networks. (Location 2494)
• When our leaders reveal their gaps in knowledge and missteps, not only are we more willing to help, but we too are more willing to share when we make mistakes or when things go wrong. (Location 2498)
• Inside the Circle, mistakes are not something to be feared. In organizations in which there is no safety provided, people are more likely to hide mistakes or problems out of self- preservation. (Location 2499)
• “The goal of a leader is to give no orders,” Captain Marquet explains. “Leaders are to provide direction and intent and allow others to figure out what to do and how to get there.” (Location 2507)
• “We train people to comply, not to think,” (Location 2508)
• If people only comply, we can’t expect people to take responsibility for their actions. The chain of command is for orders, not information. Responsibility is not doing as we are told, that’s obedience. Responsibility is doing what is right. (Location 2509)
• the crew of the Santa Fe went from waiting to be told what to do and working to protect their own hides to sacrificing for each other and working for the good of the whole. They didn’t try to undermine their captain; they wanted to make him proud. And everyone benefited. (Location 2516)
• The more energy is transferred from the top of the organization to those who are actually doing the job, those who know more about what’s going on on a daily basis, the more powerful the organization and the more powerful the leader. (Location 2524)
• Unlike in the private sector, where being good at doing is often rewarded with a position of leading, in the Marines, leadership is also a matter of character— not just strength, intelligence or achievement. (Location 2535)
• when we cannot trust the very people who are supposed to be responsible for us, bad things occur. (Location 2549)
• When we suspect the leaders of a company are saying things to make themselves or the company look better than they are or to avoid humiliation or accountability, our trust in them falters. (Location 2556)
• If we suspect our leaders are bending the truth to favor their own interests, then our subconscious mind prefers we don’t climb into a foxhole with them. (Location 2558)
• Leadership is about integrity, honesty and accountability. All components of trust. Leadership comes from telling us not what we want to hear, but rather what we need to hear. To be a true leader, to engender deep trust and loyalty, starts with telling the truth. (Location 2563)
• “integrity” means a “firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values.” This means that operating with integrity is sometimes a higher standard than operating within the confines of the law. (Location 2567)
• We need to know that the information we are given by others and especially our leaders, good or bad, is the truth. We need to know that when someone says something, they mean it. (Location 2571)
• Trust evolves once we have enough evidence to satisfy our brain that a person or an organization is, indeed, an honest broker. This is the reason integrity, for it to work, must be a practice and not simply a state of mind. (Location 2576)
• Integrity is when our words and deeds are consistent with our intentions. A lack of integrity is at best hypocrisy and at worst lying. The most common display of a lack of integrity in the business world is when a leader of an organization says what others want to hear and not the truth. (Location 2577)
• Integrity is not about being honest when we agree with each other; it is also about being honest when we disagree or, even more important, when we make mistakes or missteps. (Location 2588)
• We need people to admit when they falter and not try to hide it or spin the story in an attempt to protect their image. Any attempt at spin is self- serving, and such a selfish motivation can do damage to our group should danger present itself. (Location 2591)
• This is the deal we make with our leaders. We in the group will work hard to see their vision become a reality and they will offer us protection along the way, which includes honest assessments and commentary. We need to feel that they actually care about us. (Location 2596)
• When leaders take steps to protect their own interests, particularly when those steps are taken at the expense of others, they send a message to everyone else that it is okay to do the same. (Location 2624)
• The leaders of companies set the tone and direction for the people. Hypocrites, liars and self- interested leaders create cultures filled with hypocrites, liars and self- interested employees. The leaders of companies who tell the truth, in contrast, will create a culture of people who tell the truth. It’s not rocket science. We follow the leader. (Location 2626)
• Building trust requires nothing more than telling the truth. That’s it. No complicated formula. (Location 2645)
• We’re perfectly at peace with that. Making all the right decisions is not what engenders trust between people or between people and organizations. Being honest does. (Location 2663)
• The trust we have for an organization is built the same way as the trust we have for individuals. We need to know what to expect so we can better navigate our social bonds and know with whom we can make ourselves vulnerable and with whom we can express weakness or turn our backs. (Location 2696)
• Like the Marine who wanted to “take responsibility for his actions” only after he got caught, there is a disturbing trend in modern business to do the same. When a company gets caught with its hand in the cookie jar, do the leaders have a meeting to discuss how to mitigate or avoid punishment or do they discuss the need to do the right thing based on a higher moral code … a code of ethics and integrity? (Location 2699)
• Just as business moved from serving the customer to serving the shareholder, Congress went from a culture of cooperation to a battle of wills. (Location 2750)
• All leaders, in order to truly lead, need to walk the halls and spend time with the people they serve, “eyeball leadership,” as the Marines call it. (Location 2751)
• There is something about getting together out of context that makes us more open to getting to know someone. Whether we’re bonding with colleagues with whom we play on the company softball team, out to lunch or on a business trip with someone we don’t know well, when the responsibilities of our jobs are not forcing us to work together, when our competing interests are put aside for a while, we seem to be quite open to seeing others as people rather than coworkers or competitors. (Location 2804)
• Cooperation doesn’t mean agreement, it means working together to advance the greater good, to serve those who rely on our protection, not to rack up wins to serve the party or ourselves. (Location 2827)
• The thinking was that by focusing on shareholder value, companies would build wealth, create jobs and fuel the economy. Everybody wins. But that’s not what happened. By everybody, they meant only a few. (Location 2860)
• The 1940s saw the rise of “managerialism,” a system that defined U.S. corporations as having a broad social purpose. (Location 2863)
• For most of the twentieth century, the directors of large public corporations saw themselves as trustees and stewards charged with steering institutions in directions that served the public as they provided stable, lifelong jobs. It was a system that worked fairly well … until the challenges of the 1970s. (Location 2863)
• In 2012, Professor Lynn Stout of Cornell Law School wrote a definitive work on the subject, The Shareholder Value Myth, in which she points out that shareholder value was instantly appealing to two influential groups: activist corporate raiders and company CEOs, the very groups that would stand to benefit most from it. (Location 2877)
• the pay of corporate executives became directly linked to stock performance in the form of options and bonuses, thereby ensuring that executives were financially incentivized to put their priorities ahead of both customers and employees. (Location 2882)
• By the end of the 1980s, shareholder value had become a managing principle at GE, where Welch had been in charge since 1981. Every year, Welch would fire the bottom 10 percent of his GE managers, those whose divisions contributed the least to the company’s share price, while rewarding the top 20 percent with stock options. This “rank and yank” system was in place for most of Welch’s tenure at GE, and helped earn him the derogatory nickname “Neutron Jack.” (Location 2890)
• A leader’s legacy is only as strong as the foundation they leave behind that allows others to continue to advance the organization in their name. Legacy is not the memory of better times when the old leader was there. That’s not legacy, that’s nostalgia. (Location 2906)
• when a leader has the humility to distribute power across the organization, the strength of the company becomes less dependent on one person and is thus better able to survive. In this model, instead of trying to command- and- control everything, the leaders devote all their energy to training, building and protecting their people— to managing the Circle of Safety— so that the people can command and control any situation themselves. (Location 2912)
• “Teams led by a directive leader initially outperform those led by an empowering leader. However, despite lower early performance, teams led by an empowering leader experience higher performance improvement over time because of higher levels of team- learning, coordination, empowerment and mental model development.” (Location 2917)
• Welch and others, through the 1980s, pioneered using people as an expendable resource to the benefit of investors. Since then, it has become increasingly more common for companies to use layoffs to beef up their bottom line. (Location 2933)
• In the view of Professor Stout, Friedman, the hero of modern capitalist economics, was simply wrong. There is no legal standing to the idea that shareholders are the true owners of corporations. They simply own shares, which are abstract representations. In legalese, corporations own themselves. And given that shareholders are not the true owners of corporations, corporations have no legal requirement to maximize share price, as many have claimed. (Location 2945)
• Professor Stout takes this thinking even further to argue that maximizing shareholder value has failed. Sure it has fattened the pockets of the corporate elite, but in virtually every other way it has been bad for business and bad for the companies themselves. Employees (Location 2948)
• The emphasis businesses put on shareholder value was “misplaced,” he said. “Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.” (Location 2994)
• The perverse interpretation of shareholder- first has created cultures in which barely a single person working in any public company, large or small, feels protected by their leaders. Too many CEOs seem to skip the hard work of actually leading their employees. With an eye on short- term results, executives can’t truly inspire workers. (Location 2997)
• THE PERFORMANCE OF a company is closely tied to the personality and values of the person at the top. And the personality and values of the person at the top set the tone of the culture. (Location 3010)
• Performance can and does boost morale in the short term. But, as is the case with all dopamine rewards, that feeling doesn’t last. In contrast, when a balance of serotonin and oxytocin is maintained and the focus is put on morale first, performance will follow and the strong feelings will last. (Location 3040)
• That Costco is an amazing place to work actually drives the company’s performance. In other words, what’s good for employees really is good for Costco shareholders. (Location 3044)
• The leaders of Costco believe every company should extend the Circle of Safety to every employee, including the ones at the lowest levels of the organization. (Location 3055)
• The difference between Costco and companies like Welch’s GE is that Costco uses layoffs as a last resort, whereas the GEs of the world use them as routine strategy. (Location 3062)
• Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first. (Location 3072)
• usually the people at the edges, the infantry, so to speak, who are the most vulnerable to the external dangers. They are also the ones who tend to have more contact with clients and customers. If they feel protected, then they will do all they can to serve the customers without fear of repercussions from the company’s leaders. (Location 3073)
• Leadership is about taking responsibility for lives and not numbers. Managers look after our numbers and our results and leaders look after us. All managers of metrics have an opportunity to become leaders of people. (Location 3121)
• Thanks to the dopamine released by the alcohol, the feelings of struggle, intimidation, fear, anxiety and paranoia go away when they drink. This is one of the reasons taking control of alcoholism is so difficult. (Location 3133)
• This is the reason for supportive parents, teachers, friends and community. This is, in part, the value of the family dinner, team sports, hobbies and extracurricular activities. It is the strong support networks we build during this fragile period that teach us that we need others to help us cope and survive. (Location 3143)
• alcohol can become a substitute for relying on other people for support during periods of self- doubt. This is important because the way we learn to deal with our struggles and anxieties during adolescence is likely to become the way we deal with these challenges for the rest of our adult lives. (Location 3146)
• The pleasure we derive from alcohol or nicotine or food all comes from dopamine. Dopamine is the chemical that is released when we accomplish something or find something we are looking for. It is one of our internal incentives designed to encourage us to look for food, finish building a shelter and generally make progress as a species. It is designed to keep us engaging in behaviors that are supposed to be in the interest of our survival and prosperity. (Location 3151)
• Dopamine was built for a time when food was not so readily available. Our bodies weren’t built for a food- whenever- we- want- it world. Bingeing, gambling, drinking and smoking are all, ostensibly, dopamine addictions. (Location 3156)
• Finally, they get a rush of adrenaline and excitement and, at the point of the kill, dopamine surges through their bodies, giving them a huge sense of accomplishment. They congratulate one another and thank their trusted leader, serotonin now coursing through everyone’s veins. They slap and hug one another, feeling intense bonds of brotherhood with those who have been out in the muck with them for these few days. The oxytocin reinforces their bond. The fearless hunters bring the food back to the tribe, who shower them with praise and respect; the serotonin flows again. (Location 3165)
• Our incentive structures are almost entirely based on hitting goals and getting financial rewards for doing so. What’s more, they are usually set up to reward individual performance on achieving short- term goals— a month, quarter or year. (Location 3173)
• Whatever tactics the acquisition group members developed were designed to do one thing and one thing only— maximize their bonus. The problem was there was another group responsible for retention; they had to find ways to get all the people who had canceled their subscriptions to come back. By creating a system in which each group was preoccupied with its own metrics without concern for anyone else’s or even what would serve the company best, the leaders of AOL had effectively incentivized their people to find ways to cost the company more money. (Location 3180)
• This is what good regulations do: they attempt to balance the benefit and the cost of that benefit. (Location 3194)
• With the advent of cable television and the introduction of CNN, the news began to transform from a public service and the jewel in the crown of the networks into a twenty- four- hour opportunity to get more jewels. (Location 3225)
• The Fairness Doctrine was introduced in 1949 to prevent a broadcaster from using a network to advocate one perspective. The doctrine provided that any broadcaster granted a license by the FCC would, as a condition of its license, agree not only to discuss controversial topics that would be in the interest of the public, but also to ensure that any views expressed would be balanced by opposing voices. With that provision having been eliminated, our modern networks now have the right to take a partisan perspective and be as polarizing as they like— whatever is good for business. (Location 3237)
• If we consider the current state of television news, we get a perfect view of what happens when the drive to be first or to boost ratings is put ahead of the drive to serve the public interest. Among the worst symptoms is the media’s willingness to woefully underreport important stories while it overindulges the kinds of stories that might entertain but hardly inform. (Location 3246)
• Koppel says that news organizations went from delivering the news you need, even if you don’t want it, to the news you want even if you don’t need it. (Location 3254)
• And so, in 1999, at the height of the dot- com boom, during a time of wild speculation, the majority of the Glass- Steagall Act was repealed. The repeal of the Act was justified, as then Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said, to “enable American companies to compete in the new economy.” This is political rhetoric to disguise the true intention: to remove regulations specifically designed to protect the public welfare in order to largely help one industry (banking) get bigger so that one group (bankers) could get more hits of dopamine. (Location 3274)
• The repeal of most of Glass- Steagall is one of the more obvious and extreme examples of the attempts of some me- first Boomers to bend or break the laws in the name of self- gain. It’s an example of what happens when our leaders put their interests ahead of those they are supposed to protect. (Location 3285)
• Generations X and Y were taught to believe they could get whatever they want. Gen X, growing up before the Internet, interpreted that lesson as putting your head down and getting to work. (Location 3334)
• Gen Xers didn’t grow up practicing drills at school in case of nuclear attack. Growing up in the 1980s was a good life. The 1990s and the new millennium saw even more boom years. Dot- com. E- commerce. E- mail. E- dating. Free overnight shipping. No waiting. Get it now! (Location 3337)
• Generation Y is said to have a sense of entitlement. Many employers complain of the demands their entry- level employees often make. But I, as one observer, do not believe it is a sense of entitlement. This generation wants to work hard and is willing to work hard. What we perceive as entitlement is, in fact, impatience. An impatience driven by two things: First is a gross misunderstanding that things like success, money or happiness, come instantly. Even though our messages and books arrive the same day we want them, our careers and fulfillment do not. (Location 3339)
• Generation Y thinks that, because they have grown up with all these technologies, they are better at multitasking. I would venture to argue they are not better at multitasking. What they are better at is being distracted. (Location 3362)
• more young people are developing an addiction to distraction. An entire generation has become addicted to the dopamine- producing effects of text messages, e- mails and other online activities. (Location 3371)
• If Boomers get their dopamine from goals oriented around “more” and “bigger,” then Gen Y is getting their dopamine from anything that satisfies “faster” or “now.” Cigarettes are out. Social media is in. It’s the drug of the twenty- first century. (Location 3379)
• Like alcoholism or drug addiction, this new disease is making our youngest generation impatient at best, and, at worst, feel lonelier and more isolated than the generations before. Where alcohol replaced trusting relationships as a coping mechanism for teenagers who grew up to be alcoholics, so too are the positive affirmations we get from social media and the virtual relationships we maintain replacing real trusting relationships as coping mechanisms. (Location 3381)
• This “see it and get it” generation has an awareness of where they are standing and they know where they want to get to; what they can’t seem to understand is the journey, the very time- consuming journey. They seem flummoxed when told that things take time. They are happy to give lots of short bursts of energy and effort to things, but commitment and grit come harder. (Location 3392)
• There is an intense excitement to do good, to help, to support. Yet after the dopamine hit is felt, it’s on to the next. Without giving any significant amount of time or energy, a generation comfortable with abstraction has confused real commitment with symbolic gestures. (Location 3398)
• There is so much talk about awareness or “driving the conversation” that we’ve failed to notice that talk doesn’t solve problems; the investment of time and energy by real human beings does. Justifying such campaigns by saying they put pressure on others to do things only supports my argument that we seem less inclined to offer our own time and energy to do what needs to be done, insisting, rather, that others do it for us. (Location 3404)
• As money replaced the expense of time and energy, now brands that offer people the chance to do good by not actually doing anything replace service. Neither fulfills the human need to do real, hard work for the benefit of others. Neither fulfills the sacrifice requirements for serotonin or oxytocin. (Location 3409)
• When we feel like we are outside a Circle of Safety, with no sense of belonging and no sense that others love and care for us, we feel out of control, abandoned and left for dead. And when we feel that isolated, we become desperate. (Location 3430)
• The Me Generation, addicted to performance, dismantled the controls that protect us from corporate abuses and stock market crashes. A Distracted Generation, living in a world of abstraction, thinks it has ADHD but more likely has a dopamine- fueled addiction to social media and cell phones. (Location 3439)
• Civilizations don’t usually die from murder, to paraphrase the famous British historian Arnold Toynbee. Civilizations die from suicide. (Location 3451)
• Step Twelve is the commitment to help another alcoholic beat the disease. Step Twelve is all about service. And it is service that is the key to breaking our dopamine addictions in our organizations too. I’m not talking about serving our customers, employees or shareholders. I’m not talking about abstractions of people. I mean service to the real, living, knowable human beings with whom we work every day. (Location 3464)
• This is what commoditization is. It is when a resource becomes so ubiquitous that it loses its perceived value. (Location 3530)
• It is not when things come easily that we appreciate them, but when we have to work hard for them or when they are hard to get that those things have greater value to us. (Location 3533)
• If our species thrives when we are forced to work together to manage through hardship, then what we need to do is redefine hardship for our modern age of abundance. We need to learn how to readapt. To understand how to operate as we were designed within these complicating conditions. (Location 3563)
• IT IS NO accident that small businesses so often run innovation circles around large corporations. Though almost all large corporations today started small and innovative, they seem to lose their ability to innovate when they get big. About the only way big companies, flush with resources, seem to innovate these days is when they buy the smaller companies that have the big ideas. (Location 3568)
• Sharing a struggle for limited resources and working with people who are intent on building something out of nothing is a good formula for a small business. But recreating those conditions is extremely difficult for organizations that have already suffered together and succeeded. (Location 3573)
• they wish to innovate or command loyalty and love from their people, must reframe the struggles their companies face not in absolute terms but in terms relative to their success. In other words, the dangers and opportunities that exist outside the Circle of Safety should be exaggerated to suit the size of the organization itself. (Location 3581)
• A small company struggles because it does not have the resources to guarantee it will stay alive. Survival is a very real concern. It is how well the people pull together to outthink their problems that often makes the difference between success and failure. Trying to buy one’s way out of problems is less effective and unsustainable. A larger, more successful company, in contrast, doesn’t fear for its life because it is flush with resources. Survival is not the motivator, growth is. But we already know that growth is an abstract and non- specific destination that doesn’t ignite the human spirit. What ignites the human spirit is when the leaders of our organizations offer us a reason to grow. Aiming for the quarter or the year just isn’t that compelling, it doesn’t offer much of a struggle. (Location 3584)
• Steve Jobs set out to, in his words, “put a dent in the universe.” More practically stated, he believed that the only way for us to truly capture the full value of technology is to adapt the technology to fit the way we live our lives instead of requiring that we adapt our lives to fit the way the technology works. (Location 3598)
• If the leaders of organizations give their people something to believe in, if they offer their people a challenge that outsizes their resources but not their intellect, the people will give everything they’ve got to solve the problem. And in the process, not only will they invent and advance the company, they may even change an industry or the world in the process (just as an early version of Microsoft did). (Location 3601)
• Human beings have thrived for fifty thousand years not because we are driven to serve ourselves, but because we are inspired to serve others. That’s the value of Step Twelve. All we need are leaders to give us a good reason to commit ourselves to each other. (Location 3630)
• Empathy is not something we offer to our customers or our employees from nine to five. Empathy is, as Johnny Bravo explains, “a second by second, minute by minute service that [we] owe to everyone if [we] want to call [ourselves] a leader.” (Location 3641)
• Leadership is not a license to do less; it is a responsibility to do more. And that’s the trouble. Leadership takes work. It takes time and energy. The effects are not always easily measured and they are not always immediate. Leadership is always a commitment to human beings. (Location 3643)
• Everything about being a leader is like being a parent. It is about committing to the well- being of those in our care and having a willingness to make sacrifices to see their interests advanced so that they may carry our banner long after we are gone. (Location 3659)
• Sir Isaac Newton, the seventeenth- century English physicist, offered as his Second Law of Motion the formula f = ma. Force equals mass times acceleration. When the mass we aim to move is great, we must apply more force. (Location 3661)
• Leadership, true leadership, is not the bastion of those who sit at the top. It is the responsibility of anyone who belongs to the group. Though those with formal rank may have authority to work at greater scale, each of us has a responsibility to keep the Circle of Safety strong. (Location 3668)