It's All About The Right Mindset

Simon Sinek already published three books about his view on what is wrong with the current mindset by many people, be it their personal or business mindset. It is all about the right mindset, for the game you are playing.

Simon Sinek owned a company in marketing and had a burn-out. He started thinking about what was wrong with him and then came to the realisation that his actions were in complete opposite with his answer to the question: Why do you get out of bed each morning? Finding the answer to this question, he radicaly changed course and started thinking more and more about how the natural behaviour of people are contradictionary to how corporations operated in those days. And they still do!

People need a safe environment to flourish. They need to know they are counted upon, that they can make mistakes and learn from them, and not be shot down when they do. Especialy in rough times people need to know they have a safe heaven to fall back to, but in rough times our businesses do exactly the opposite: lay-off round after lay-off round; which not exactly instills a safe environment.

Simon Sinek began to give speaches at confrences and also did some TED-Talks, which can be found on YouTube, sharing his view on what is wrong with current day business leaders' mindset. He explains that many of them are approaching business with a finite mindset, while doing business is by definition an infinite process.

In today's business it is common for a company to have a vision, but most of these visions lack a Just Cause. As Simon Sinek explains:

The motivation to play in an infinite game is completely different - the goal is not to win, but to keep playing. It is to advance something bigger than ourselves or our organizations.

A good vision therefore needs to contain these five parts:

• For Something - affirmative and optimistic
• Inclusive - open to all who would like to contribute
• Service Oriented - for the primary benefit of others
• Resiliant - able to endure political, technological and cultural change
• Idealistic - big, bold and ultimately unachievable

where the explanation of each catagory is off course mandatory to implement.

He then goes on and gives examples for all of these five catagories. Part of his example for Resiliancy is about the music industry:

Had the music industry defined themselves as the sharers of music rather than sellers of records, tapes and CDs they would have had an easier time in a world of digital streaming. By defining themselves by a cause greater than the product they sold, they could have invented services like iTunes or Spotify. But they didn't ... and now they are paying the price for it.

In his TED-Talks he consistantly takes into account the way people naturaly react to things happening around them, and then builds upon that, to strengthen this framework.

He also sees all around the world populistic politicians winning elections, a sure sign that people want something else, something different than what is being dealt to them. A finite mindset in an infinite game ultimately leads to inbalance, and nature has a way of balancing out inbalances.