Simon Sinek
Simon Sinek
Simon O. Sinekis an author, speaker, and consultant who writes on leadership and management. He joined the RAND Corporation in 2010 as an adjunct staff member, where he advises on matters of military innovation and planning. He is known for popularizing the concepts of "the golden circle" and to "Start With Why", described by TED as "a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?"'. Sinek's first TEDx Talk on "How...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth9 October 1973
It is better to disappoint people with the truth than to appease them with a lie.
There is a difference between vulnerability and telling people everything about yourself. Vulnerability is a feeling. Telling everyone about yourself is just facts and details.
Over 90% of people go home at the end of the day feeling unfulfilled by their work, and I won't stop working until that statistic is reversed - until over 90% of people go home and can honestly say, 'I love what I do.'
People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
The leader's job is to lead and protect. Not have all the answers, not know everything to do, not to micromanage and tell people what to do or how to do it. A leader's job is to lead and protect. That's their job, and it's the people within the organization - their job is to get the work done.
I can't stand those people, speakers in a room, they say this all the time, "If I can just help one person in this room, I've done my job." You have an audience of 500 people and your standard of success is one person? That's terrible. If you help one person in the room, you're an abject failure. You have to change something.
Leadership is a choice. It's not a rank, it's a choice. I know many people who are at the top of their organization who have authority. We have to do what they say because they have authority over us. But they're not leaders. We wouldn't follow them. They may be at the top of the company but they're not leaders.
Leadership is about making people feel safe. When someone feels heard, they feel safe.
People don't buy what you do; they buy what you stand for.
When we are in groups, when we are surrounded by people who believe what we believe, trust emerges and our very survival and progress goes up.
If our leaders are to enjoy the trappings of their position in the hierarchy, then we expect them to offer us protection. The problem is, 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.
When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from.
The value of networking is not measured by the number of people we meet but by the number of people we introduce to others.
The Democrats' response throughout the healthcare debate? Give the people more statistics.