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Everything by Simon Sinek, but most important for me is "Leaders Eat Last" [0]. I haven't read the last one (The Infinite Game), but I've heard it's pretty good

Everything by Simon Sinek, but most important for me is "Leaders Eat Last" [0]. I haven't read the last one (The Infinite Game), but I've heard it's pretty good as well. Also Extreme Ownership [1] and Dichotomy of Leadership [2] by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. All of these books had tremendous impact on me as a leader and I highly recommend them. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Leaders-Eat-Last-Together-Others/dp/B00HQ3K34M/ https://www.amazon.com/Leaders-Eat-Last-Together-Others/dp/B... [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs-ebook/dp/B00VE4Y0Z2 https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs-eboo... [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Dichotomy-Leadership-Balancing-Challenges-Ownership/dp/B07BN5NGQ5/ https://www.amazon.com/Dichotomy-Leadership-Balancing-Challe...

abhiyerra 7y ago
Leaders Eat Last was one of the best books I read this year. Extreme Ownership was also quite good but Simon really explains the “Why” of leadership that most books are missing. High-Output Management is another classic.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago
  I understand the “why” of leadership very well, but as a high-functioning autistic person, I struggle very much with the “how”, especially around communication. Like - for all possible values of X, if X is what I want someone to do, how do I communicate that so people (a) understand that I want X from them and (b) aren’t offended and understand that it is meant kindly/charitably (which it really is, I often just don’t know how to say so without sounding weird or changing the value of X). Here’s a small example scenario from home life: my son was crying in his room. I was in the middle of something but wanted to take care of him and let my wife rest. She got up and started down the hall. I said “I was going to get it” expecting her to say “OK” and come back. Instead she sighed and did it anyway, and later said she felt frustrated that I made an excuse instead of either taking action or not. I explained to her what I wanted and asked what I should have said instead, and she said to say “Please stop. I’ve got this.” Next time I said that instead, and was amazed how different her response was - she was happy/grateful to let me take cars of it. I guess I need a book full of “scripts” that would help me communicate both text and subtext accurately. Any resource suggestions?
  - abhiyerra 7y ago
    - High-Ouput Management - Five Disfunctions of a Team - The Goal - Principles by Ray Dalio - Good Profit by Charles Koch All of the books above cover some aspect of what you want but don’t seem to cover the whole picture. Further, a lot of it comes down to shared mental models. If you are coming from the perspective of action taking then the other person also assumes that you will take the action. I think Leader Eat Last explains this brilliantly and actually significantly changed the way I am trying to approach leadership as well as how I work with other people in general.
  - josephmosby 7y ago
    This is not a book full of "scripts," but will hopefully help inform future actions: The "Please stop. I've got this." is an action-oriented message that is conveyed before the action. It says "I would like for you to do X because of Y." It is conveyed in an imperative structure, which is used for a command or a request. "Please stop." <- request. "I've got this." <- followed by a rationale for your request. The request is conveyed first, followed by the rationale for why you are making it. "Do this. Here is why." The "I've got this" also carries succinct subtext of "I agree with you that our son crying is a problem that someone should take care of, I just think it should be me instead of you." Conversely, when you say "I was going to get it," it is a declarative message rather than an imperative message. It does not tell your wife what you would like for her to do. It is merely additional data that does not help her make better decisions, which means it is mostly useless for her. An extreme comparative example is looking at a person who has just burned their hand at the stove and then saying "that stove appears hot." Humans don't like to receive an array of "reasons" data before they've received the "request." We don't like statements in the form of "because of Y, Z, A, B, C... please do X." Our subconscious can typically detect that we are receiving a stream of "reasons" and we are starting to brace for the "request" (because the request might be unpleasant). People like to know what others expect of them. Your comment says you would like to know what your wife expects of you. When you follow the <command> <rationale for command> order of operations you are giving people what they want (what you expect of them) followed by your reason for wanting that. When you go in the opposite order, you are conveying the converse: "I want something of you but I haven't told you what it is yet."
gbersac 7y ago
Extreme ownership is awesome.
tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
Already been said a few times, but just feel like I had to add again for added emphasis. Extreme Ownership is the best book on Leadership I have ever read. Changed my thinking forever.
gingerlime 7y ago
I must have missed something, seeing extreme ownership praised so much but I stopped reading it after a chapter or so. The whole macho thing didn’t jive and I’m struggling to find parallels to ordinary life. Lives aren’t at stake for 99.9999% of work out there. The whole military hierarchy and all the idealization doesn’t exist in normal contexts. Leaders aren’t trusted implicitly always or “lives are at stake”. So how does it translate?? Perhaps my view is tainted having been through mandatory military service, and hated every minute of it. But I guess I simply “don’t get it”
- jdgoesmarching 7y ago
  Veteran here as well and Sinek annoys the hell out of me. If it’s the first and only book you’ve read on leadership then maybe some of the points are helpful, but I find it to be mostly self-absorbed superficial garbage that business majors flock to five minutes after graduating. It’s the leadership equivalent of that Not Giving a Fuck book.
- zedgerman 7y ago
  I agree /lives/ aren’t directly at stake, but depending on what your business is, /livelihoods/ are. When you’re an entrepreneur and have a small team, each of them may have a family. As the leader you are responsible for running a profitable company that can pay its employees so their families can eat. At the large company I work for my team’s product is B2B. When we go down, other businesses go down. The number of people affected is very high. Treating every incident like someone’s business is dependent on you and they have put their trust in you to support them is very sobering.
- Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
  Corporate business leaders here in America tend to be obsessed with trying to apply military-style terminology and doctrines to their business. In their minds, business is war, and "lives are at stake" gets translated to either "jobs are at stake" or "revenue is at stake," depending on the person. There are so many war-isms in business it's impossible to list them all. "In the trenches," "boots on the ground," framing sales territories as battlegrounds... In short, these things sell because American business leaders fetishize these sort of ex-SEAL types. It's all a little much for me. Not to mention unfortunate, because the sort of leadership that works best in the military is decidedly not the sort of leadership that works best in business. The military demands that soldiers immediately and unquestioningly follow commands given by their superiors (particularly during combat). Lives are literally at stake, so any hesitation for even a moment could spell doom. Meanwhile, in business, I strongly believe leaders need to be in more of a team-servant role -- yes, motivating, providing vision, etc., but also cultivating a sense of "your voice matters," if that makes sense. Being a 'force multiplier' in business requires a different mentality than in war zones.
dooferlad 7y ago
The Infinite Game is also great. The focus is on building companies that last hundreds of years, so you need leadership, culture and investors that are all about long term stability over keeping sort term investors happy. There are some rants, but nothing I disagree with!
saberience 7y ago
Simon Sinek has never actually led anything and is basically someone who is an expert at marketing himself. His advice doesn’t say anything new and is usually extremely banal. He’s the classic example of fake it till you make it in modern America. A guy who makes flashy viral videos, has zero actual experience of leading organizations or teams, yet someone has acquired some guru like reputation at a genius leader.
- shortandsweet 7y ago
  Ok, where's your book so I can read and compare?
  - saberience 7y ago
    I've never directed a movie but I'm not allowed to say that Dumb and Dumber 2 is a terrible movie? Your logic makes no sense. I've read well and deeply across a broad spectrum of classic philosophy and psychology and I think Simon Sinek is a dilettante and basic thinker. I'm allowed to have that opinion regardless of whether I have written books or not.
- andrei_says_ 7y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree. A great example of marketing fluff content. Still, a great example of marketing and proof that fluff sells and is probably useful for many.
- latexr 7y ago
  > Simon Sinek has never actually led anything and is basically someone who is an expert at marketing himself. Taking him at his word on several of his talks, he leads a team right now. Presumably one focused on advancing your second point: his marketing of himself. > His advice doesn’t say anything new and is usually extremely banal. The corollary being they’re banal to you, cue tangential XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/1053/ https://www.xkcd.com/1053/ Note I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you. He also seems to me like someone who teaches what he learned by theory, not practice. However, I do believe his intentions are genuine, that he wants to make the workplace better for everyone, and that his points are actionable and positive. Contrast that to someone like Tony Robbins, which I view as little more than a scammer that wants to trick you into thinking anyone can be successful at anything if they just believe in themselves and pay him hefty sums to attend his seminars.
npv789 7y ago
simon sinek is a motivator, and had no experience in leadership
ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
I'm typically a Simon Sinek fan but (The Infinite Game) left a poor taste in my mouth. I had just finished (Finite and Infinite Games) by James P. Carse. He normally does a great job distilling information from mulitple sources, but in this case it seemed like he added nothing, condensed nothing, and in my opinion came really close to just rewriting the first 1/2 of someone else's book and calling it a new thing. I'm not calling it plagiarism, he's obviously too smart to cross that line. But if you read the books you will see what I mean.
robbiep 7y ago
I can’t handle the level of repetition. You read one chapter and you’ve read the entire book. It could literally just be a bumper sticker - ‘real leaders eat last’ - ok got your thesis
- josephmosby 7y ago
  That is unfortunately most Simon Sinek material for me. I think he is a super sharp thinker, but I always come away feeling like his books could have been a blog post and his blog posts could have probably been a tweet.
latexr 7y ago
Simon Sinek is a charismatic speaker with good points and interesting stories, but I find his books full of fluff: a central thesis padded to the length of a book so it’s publishable. You get the same information by watching videos of his talks, with the advantage they are free, more direct, and take less of your time. Plus, they’re released sparingly and have quite a bit of repetition with slow changes between them, so the points get to sink in over time.

abhiyerra 7y ago

Leaders Eat Last was one of the best books I read this year. Extreme Ownership was also quite good but Simon really explains the “Why” of leadership that most books are missing. High-Output Management is another classic.

TimTheTinker 7y ago
I understand the “why” of leadership very well, but as a high-functioning autistic person, I struggle very much with the “how”, especially around communication. Like - for all possible values of X, if X is what I want someone to do, how do I communicate that so people (a) understand that I want X from them and (b) aren’t offended and understand that it is meant kindly/charitably (which it really is, I often just don’t know how to say so without sounding weird or changing the value of X). Here’s a small example scenario from home life: my son was crying in his room. I was in the middle of something but wanted to take care of him and let my wife rest. She got up and started down the hall. I said “I was going to get it” expecting her to say “OK” and come back. Instead she sighed and did it anyway, and later said she felt frustrated that I made an excuse instead of either taking action or not. I explained to her what I wanted and asked what I should have said instead, and she said to say “Please stop. I’ve got this.” Next time I said that instead, and was amazed how different her response was - she was happy/grateful to let me take cars of it. I guess I need a book full of “scripts” that would help me communicate both text and subtext accurately. Any resource suggestions?
- abhiyerra 7y ago
  - High-Ouput Management - Five Disfunctions of a Team - The Goal - Principles by Ray Dalio - Good Profit by Charles Koch All of the books above cover some aspect of what you want but don’t seem to cover the whole picture. Further, a lot of it comes down to shared mental models. If you are coming from the perspective of action taking then the other person also assumes that you will take the action. I think Leader Eat Last explains this brilliantly and actually significantly changed the way I am trying to approach leadership as well as how I work with other people in general.
- josephmosby 7y ago
  This is not a book full of "scripts," but will hopefully help inform future actions: The "Please stop. I've got this." is an action-oriented message that is conveyed before the action. It says "I would like for you to do X because of Y." It is conveyed in an imperative structure, which is used for a command or a request. "Please stop." <- request. "I've got this." <- followed by a rationale for your request. The request is conveyed first, followed by the rationale for why you are making it. "Do this. Here is why." The "I've got this" also carries succinct subtext of "I agree with you that our son crying is a problem that someone should take care of, I just think it should be me instead of you." Conversely, when you say "I was going to get it," it is a declarative message rather than an imperative message. It does not tell your wife what you would like for her to do. It is merely additional data that does not help her make better decisions, which means it is mostly useless for her. An extreme comparative example is looking at a person who has just burned their hand at the stove and then saying "that stove appears hot." Humans don't like to receive an array of "reasons" data before they've received the "request." We don't like statements in the form of "because of Y, Z, A, B, C... please do X." Our subconscious can typically detect that we are receiving a stream of "reasons" and we are starting to brace for the "request" (because the request might be unpleasant). People like to know what others expect of them. Your comment says you would like to know what your wife expects of you. When you follow the <command> <rationale for command> order of operations you are giving people what they want (what you expect of them) followed by your reason for wanting that. When you go in the opposite order, you are conveying the converse: "I want something of you but I haven't told you what it is yet."

gbersac 7y ago

Extreme ownership is awesome.

tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago

Already been said a few times, but just feel like I had to add again for added emphasis. Extreme Ownership is the best book on Leadership I have ever read. Changed my thinking forever.

gingerlime 7y ago

I must have missed something, seeing extreme ownership praised so much but I stopped reading it after a chapter or so. The whole macho thing didn’t jive and I’m struggling to find parallels to ordinary life. Lives aren’t at stake for 99.9999% of work out there. The whole military hierarchy and all the idealization doesn’t exist in normal contexts. Leaders aren’t trusted implicitly always or “lives are at stake”. So how does it translate?? Perhaps my view is tainted having been through mandatory military service, and hated every minute of it. But I guess I simply “don’t get it”

jdgoesmarching 7y ago
Veteran here as well and Sinek annoys the hell out of me. If it’s the first and only book you’ve read on leadership then maybe some of the points are helpful, but I find it to be mostly self-absorbed superficial garbage that business majors flock to five minutes after graduating. It’s the leadership equivalent of that Not Giving a Fuck book.
zedgerman 7y ago
I agree /lives/ aren’t directly at stake, but depending on what your business is, /livelihoods/ are. When you’re an entrepreneur and have a small team, each of them may have a family. As the leader you are responsible for running a profitable company that can pay its employees so their families can eat. At the large company I work for my team’s product is B2B. When we go down, other businesses go down. The number of people affected is very high. Treating every incident like someone’s business is dependent on you and they have put their trust in you to support them is very sobering.
Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
Corporate business leaders here in America tend to be obsessed with trying to apply military-style terminology and doctrines to their business. In their minds, business is war, and "lives are at stake" gets translated to either "jobs are at stake" or "revenue is at stake," depending on the person. There are so many war-isms in business it's impossible to list them all. "In the trenches," "boots on the ground," framing sales territories as battlegrounds... In short, these things sell because American business leaders fetishize these sort of ex-SEAL types. It's all a little much for me. Not to mention unfortunate, because the sort of leadership that works best in the military is decidedly not the sort of leadership that works best in business. The military demands that soldiers immediately and unquestioningly follow commands given by their superiors (particularly during combat). Lives are literally at stake, so any hesitation for even a moment could spell doom. Meanwhile, in business, I strongly believe leaders need to be in more of a team-servant role -- yes, motivating, providing vision, etc., but also cultivating a sense of "your voice matters," if that makes sense. Being a 'force multiplier' in business requires a different mentality than in war zones.

dooferlad 7y ago

The Infinite Game is also great. The focus is on building companies that last hundreds of years, so you need leadership, culture and investors that are all about long term stability over keeping sort term investors happy. There are some rants, but nothing I disagree with!

saberience 7y ago

Simon Sinek has never actually led anything and is basically someone who is an expert at marketing himself. His advice doesn’t say anything new and is usually extremely banal. He’s the classic example of fake it till you make it in modern America. A guy who makes flashy viral videos, has zero actual experience of leading organizations or teams, yet someone has acquired some guru like reputation at a genius leader.

shortandsweet 7y ago
Ok, where's your book so I can read and compare?
- saberience 7y ago
  I've never directed a movie but I'm not allowed to say that Dumb and Dumber 2 is a terrible movie? Your logic makes no sense. I've read well and deeply across a broad spectrum of classic philosophy and psychology and I think Simon Sinek is a dilettante and basic thinker. I'm allowed to have that opinion regardless of whether I have written books or not.
andrei_says_ 7y ago
I wholeheartedly agree. A great example of marketing fluff content. Still, a great example of marketing and proof that fluff sells and is probably useful for many.
latexr 7y ago
> Simon Sinek has never actually led anything and is basically someone who is an expert at marketing himself. Taking him at his word on several of his talks, he leads a team right now. Presumably one focused on advancing your second point: his marketing of himself. > His advice doesn’t say anything new and is usually extremely banal. The corollary being they’re banal to you, cue tangential XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/1053/ https://www.xkcd.com/1053/ Note I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you. He also seems to me like someone who teaches what he learned by theory, not practice. However, I do believe his intentions are genuine, that he wants to make the workplace better for everyone, and that his points are actionable and positive. Contrast that to someone like Tony Robbins, which I view as little more than a scammer that wants to trick you into thinking anyone can be successful at anything if they just believe in themselves and pay him hefty sums to attend his seminars.

npv789 7y ago

simon sinek is a motivator, and had no experience in leadership

ghostbrainalpha 7y ago

I'm typically a Simon Sinek fan but (The Infinite Game) left a poor taste in my mouth. I had just finished (Finite and Infinite Games) by James P. Carse. He normally does a great job distilling information from mulitple sources, but in this case it seemed like he added nothing, condensed nothing, and in my opinion came really close to just rewriting the first 1/2 of someone else's book and calling it a new thing. I'm not calling it plagiarism, he's obviously too smart to cross that line. But if you read the books you will see what I mean.

robbiep 7y ago

I can’t handle the level of repetition. You read one chapter and you’ve read the entire book. It could literally just be a bumper sticker - ‘real leaders eat last’ - ok got your thesis

josephmosby 7y ago
That is unfortunately most Simon Sinek material for me. I think he is a super sharp thinker, but I always come away feeling like his books could have been a blog post and his blog posts could have probably been a tweet.

latexr 7y ago

Simon Sinek is a charismatic speaker with good points and interesting stories, but I find his books full of fluff: a central thesis padded to the length of a book so it’s publishable. You get the same information by watching videos of his talks, with the advantage they are free, more direct, and take less of your time. Plus, they’re released sparingly and have quite a bit of repetition with slow changes between them, so the points get to sink in over time.