really appreciate you taking time to visit with us.

Simon Sinek: Oh, my pleasure. Ron: Yesterday, I was finalizing my notes

for today's call and I jumped over to TED.com and I looked up your famous "How Great Leaders

Inspire Action" video. I think I've watched it a few thousand times.

But I saw that it's up to 23 million views. That blew my mind a little bit. I'm just curious,

could you have ever imagined when you did that 18-minute talk, that it would go on to

be one of the most watched Ted Talks of all time?

Simon: No, of course not. Nobody can plan for that. People ask me all the time, they're

like, "How are you going to do another Ted Talk as popular as your first?" And the answer

is I'm not. [laughs] I didn't plan for that to happen, so I certainly

can't plan to beat it. Ron: I'm curious, how did you prepare for

that talk? Had you done that particular talk before?

Simon: I had been giving that talk in an hour, an hour and a half version for about three

years prior. What I didn't think was possible was to communicate the message in 18 minutes.

Ron: [laughs] Yes. Simon: When they asked me to do it, I thought,

"That's not possible." Of course, that's not an option. Yeah, I guess it works.

Ron: It definitely works, yeah. It's one of my favorite videos of all time. Actually,

we saw you at the AME Conference last year in Florida. That was brilliant, as well.

I don't know if you remember that, but that was great. The first question I have for you

is I'm curious, as it relates to your work, what problems are you trying to solve?

Simon: The discovery of the “Why,” for me, solved a very personal problem. I'd lost

my passion for what I was doing, and the process of discovering my “Why” restored my passion

to levels I'd never experienced before. It was only in learning more about it and

the biology of human decision making did I realize that this is not some management idea,

but this is literally the biology of how our brains work, how we make decisions, how we

live our lives, how we run organizations. My work all contributes to this idea that

we're all entitled to be passionate about the work that we do. Fulfillment, inspiration

is not a luxury but a privilege. It's not for the few people who get to say, "I love

my job," and the rest of us go, "Oh, you're so lucky."

Everybody gets to say that, and we get to demand from our leaders that they provide

environments that we want to come and work in and feel inspired to work in every day.

Ron: I can't help but think of Barry-Wehmiller as one of the best at doing exactly what you

just said. Perhaps we can explore that later in the show.

First, I want to talk a little bit about the golden circle, Simon. You first shared the

golden circle in that Ted Talk that I mentioned earlier.

You taught us that while knowing what we do and how we do it is important, the most critical

thing we can understand is why we do what we do. I'm interested to know, how did you

arrive at the idea of the golden circle? Was it through research or some sort of self-discovery?

Simon: It was an evolutionary idea. It's not like I sat in a room and just popped it out.

It originally began as an idea where I wanted to understand why some marketing works and

some marketing doesn't. I came from a marketing world, and I was always

astounded by how I could take the same team and put them on one client or a different

client, and we'd have completely different results, even though, I had the same brilliant

people working on it. I realized there was a pattern to how good

marketing works, and I wrote it down, and it was that order.

It wasn't until I started to learn about the biology, which came a little later, did bells

and lights start flashing. I realized this wasn't about how marketing works, this is

about how we live our lives, and that's when things started to make sense.

Ron: In "Leaders Eat Last," you explored a topic of brain science and why things like

dopamine and oxytocin play such a critical role in human behavior. How did you come to

study this? Simon: I'm not a researcher, per se. I'm not

an academic, but I am a little kid. I have an insatiable curiosity to understand why

things work and why things do the things they do, in all aspects of my life. I get on a

plane, I want to understand how a wing works and a jet engine works. It's just how I am.

I went on a trip to Afghanistan as a guest

of the United States Air Force, and everything on our trip went wrong. It was a very intense

experience and would observe these remarkable human beings around me who trusted each other

with their lives. As I like to say, we give medals to people

in the military who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain, where

in the private sector, we give bonuses to people who are willing to sacrifice others

so that we may gain. I realized it was completely different to the world I was brought up in,

in the private sector in business. It was no other reason than I just wanted

to understand where trust came from. Are they actually more trustworthy people? Is that

really what it is? That doesn't sound right. When you start asking these questions about

why trust exists in some organizations and not others, it necessarily takes you back

to our anthropological beginnings and makes you forced to understand the environments

for which we were designed to survive in. That's where it all began. It came from my

desire to be around more people to trust. Like I said, all my work is semi-autobiographical,

it was my own struggle. Ron: Yeah, I hear you. Obviously, you teach

the importance of understanding our “Why.” In other words, what's our cause? What's our

purpose? Why do we do what we do? My question is, is any “Why” okay, or are some “Whys”

better than others? In other words, is there a North Star that should be guiding us?

Simon: No, because it's subjective. All “Whys” are positive. People say, "That guy's a negative

‘Why.’" Nope, all “Whys” are positive. The other thing is all “Whys” have nothing

to do with the product or service that you sell or offer, and you only have one. People

are like, "We have four ‘Whys.’" I'm like, "No, you don't. You have one ‘Why.’

It's the sum total of who you are, how you were raised, the lessons you learned as a

young person, and the rest of your life simply serves as an opportunity to either live in

or out of balance with your ‘Why.’" It’s the same with an organization. A “Why”

is why was the organization founded? What problem was it attempting to solve? The founders,

what vision did they have? It's an origin story. There's no such thing as a North-Star

“Why” objectively. This is why a “Why” is important, because your “Why” may resonate

with some people and not others. That's the point of stating and knowing your

“Why,” which is you want to attract the people who believe what you believe, and you

want to be attracted to the people who believe what you believe. That's why when we listen

to political races, we want our leaders or our would-be leaders to tell us what they

believe, not just what they'd do. When we hear what they believe, we want to

align ourselves with those who share our beliefs and that we trust that they will do the things

to uphold those beliefs. The same is true in a company. We want to know what the company

stands for, why they do what they do so that we can devote ourselves and our energies to

helping them advance that cause.

Otherwise, it's just a job, just a series of transactions. I do work, you pay me money.

It's a transactional relationship. Ron: If you could just take a rough swag at

a percentage of companies that have done a great job of identifying their “Why,”

what would you think it would be? Simon: Under 10 percent.

Ron: Really? [laughs] Simon: Yeah.

Ron: Wow, that's pretty scary, really, isn't it? Simon: I see opportunity. [laughs]

Ron: You have job security, Simon, I guess. [laughs]

Simon: That's depressing, isn't it? I'd like to work myself out of a job. I talk about

trust and cooperation. There should be no demand

for my work. Ron: That's true, yes. How does your work

apply to people who, let's say, aren't knowledge workers, or perhaps they're not even leaders

of people? In other words, say, some person listening

to this right now hates their retail job or their factory job. Can they get value out

of the golden circle and finding their “Why” just as individuals?

Simon: Oh my goodness, of course. It has nothing to do with the work that we do. It has to

do with the people with whom we work. We are social animals, and we respond to the environments

we're in. You take a good person, you put them in a bad environment, they're capable

of doing bad things. You take a person that maybe others have given

up on, they may have even performed bad acts, you put them in a good environment, they're

capable of becoming remarkable human beings. I think people in the knowledge business world

suffer from hubris and terrible ethnocentrism, that, "I can't imagine someone who works in

a factory would actually be happy." That's because they think happiness is equated with

the work that you do, which is nonsense. Happiness and joy are equated with the people with whom

we work. If we feel trusted then we love going to work,

regardless of the work that we do. We've all helped our friends move, and it's been a joyous

experience. Lifting boxes, carrying them, and putting them on a truck is not a joyous

experience, but serving and taking care of our friends is.

We've all been on our hands and knees trying to help someone build IKEA furniture. It's

a pretty awful job, it's a pretty awful task, but we enjoy it and we say yes because of

the joy of helping our friends or having the joy of our friends helping us. It's terribly,

terribly pompous to think that because the work is unglamorous that you can't have joy.

I can tell you, I've met factory workers and people who are in the stone crushing business

who were way happier, way more inspired, and way more fulfilled than somebody who works

for a tech company or a bank. Ron: I don't know how much you've studied

the Lean movement that we work in, but one of the principles that we teach is Respect

for People. What you're saying is so true. It doesn't matter if you sweep floors or you're

the CEO, we all have inherent respect, and we should all take care of one another and

help each other. Simon: We're all cogs in a machine. Some of

them have a more visible role, like the hands on the front of the clock, and some of them

are more hidden, but every piece in that machine needs to work and feel valued and valuable.

Otherwise, things break. That's just the way it works. That's why we refer to companies

as "well-oiled machines." As you know from the Toyota experience, Lean

has nothing to do with efficiency. Lean has everything to do with people. The biggest

mistake the Americans made bringing the Toyota process to America was calling it Lean.

Ron: [laughs] I didn't know how much you really knew about the Lean movement, Simon, I have

a whole new army of questions for you. I'm fascinated to hear you say that.

Simon: Americans turned it into a tool for efficiency, and that's never what it was supposed

to be. There are zero, zero examples of an American company successfully implementing

Lean when they do it as a tool for efficiency. Zero. How good can a process be if there are

zero examples of success? When it's used as a people tool, it's used

for a tool for helping people respect each other, and helping each other, and kaizen

moments where you can help someone else solve the problem that they're suffering. You can

take an accountant, and ask them to look at this machine, and say, "Do you see something

that I'm not seeing?" It's about cooperation, not efficiency. Efficiency

may come out of the cooperation, as will profit and innovation, but the motivation is human.

It's not a metric. Ron: Back in the '80s, when Dr. Womack and

these guys were traveling around Japan, and it's actually John Krafcik who coined the

term Lean. If you had been sitting in that room, and

you were on that research team working around and looking at why are these guys so good,

and you're trying to come up with a name to call this, what would you have said?

Simon: This is the challenge when you have economists and these guys doing the research,

because they're looking at the results. If you had social scientists and anthropologists

doing the research, they would have named it something else.

They would have called it teaming, or they

would have called it cooperation, or they would have called it trust, or they would