Leaders Eat Last

I was hoping for a book on leadership, but I feel like my biggest takeaway was a better understanding of the history of the American economy.

This book touches on many leadership areas. Each well built up with good arguments and opportunity of learning. I think this book can be read multiple times before everything sinks in. As I recently read a bad book on culture, this book is better on that topic even though its just a subtopic of this book.

Though I did not think this book got me in to a flow of learning, perhaps it was my mode, but that why it was not more than a I liked it.

Very insightful! Enjoyed everything the writer had to say. I do think the book might be lacking the general idea.

Key takeaways:

- The main takeaway: Take care of your people (and treat them like people), then they will take care of your business.
- A team can only effectively face external threats when there are no internal threats. It's up to the leaders to eliminate those. You need a circle of safety.
- Leaders of great organizations don't look at people as commodities to grow the money, but they see money as a commodity to help grow their people.
- The story of the gazelle looking up when they think they spot danger, then that spreading to the rest of the herd was potent. It could be a positive, but, as outlined in this story, works the other way as well. If one of the teams senses ‘danger', everyone will feel it and become sensitive to it.
- We can change the chemical stimulation our team receives. Endorphins help hide pain; dopamine makes you feel good about accomplishing a goal; serotonin makes you feel grateful for the people who support you; oxytocin is responsible for love and released when bonding. You can use these to build a strong team with a circle of safety. Cortisol is released when stressed, which inhibits the other chemicals, and makes us more selfish.
- Abstraction Kills. If you make decisions after looking at numbers on a spreadsheet, you will be missing the human effect. Before deciding on layoffs, pay cuts, etc., put yourself in the shoes of one of the employees or customers who will be impacted by your decision.

I feel like back when this first came out it would have been groundbreaking, but at this point empathy and advocacy for people in the workplace isn't really anything new?

I'm probably in the audience for this book, but I'm finding it hard to rate it accurately as I'm already familiar with most of the material the author covers. However, I did find two things notable:

1. The author calls out Friedman on the “greed is good” theory of corporate operation, that is, maximizing shareholder value being the sole concern of a corporation. I have never believed this myself, and with “corporate personhood” established by the law, it's no surprise a large amount of corporate behavior is sociopathic at best. We imprison people for taking “me first” to its logical conclusion, incorporating should come with more social responsibility, not less. Friedman got a Nobel prize for this notion. The author takes Friedman to task, and in my opinion rightly so.

2. I feel the author was unduly harsh on Jack Welch. This may be because I'm currently reading Welch's “Winning,” and can see the mismatch between what Welch writes and how it's taken. For example, Welch's description of stack ranking (differentiation) does not square with what I've read about it, nor what I've experienced directly by way of family working for GE during Welch's tenure. Specifically, Welch spends a lot of words advocating for the middle 70%. That part isn't much discussed by the author, or other authors, and certainly not executed on in my experience. The irony is that Welch and the author are much more closely aligned on people development than the author writes.

Good primer on the value of psychological safety in the workplace, especially when it comes to allegedly unmanageable millennials. Nothing truly unique or groundbreaking in here, but a definite must-read for the boomers who don't understand why their “human capital” keeps quitting faster than they can fire them when the quarterly numbers don't add up.

These can be hit-or-miss but this one hit for me. Diagnosis of the downfalls of 20th and early 21st century workplaces matched my experience. Probably best read with Quiet, because this one overemphasizes extroversion.

I have to say, I enjoy listening to Sinek in interview more than reading his books.
He is passionate and a great salesman, however his books do not have the same energy (for me, at any rate).

Interesting ideas, which ‘chime' with my own views and experiences within organisations.

They do however seem to be repeated a few times within the book and not in a ‘building mass / effect' way.

I read it a few times.

Every leader should read this

Its a thing you like if you like this type of thing.... I've spent the last few years reading as many books on management and leadership as I can get into my hands. This is one of the few that I will read again.... This essentially falls into the don't be a jerk category of leadership.... aka not a Jack Welch book.

For new managers or aspiring leaders I recommend this book. It is well worth the few hours to help put your head in the right place.

This book is OK, but not ground breaking. Summarised in one sentence it's: “Look after your people and they will look after your company.” but Sinek uses a bookload more words to repeat the same thing many times.

He does go into some detail about why the world is in such a state (hint: because if the baby boomers) and explains how we got here, which is interesting.

A bit heavy, with Sinek's earnestness reminding me sometimes of Dave Barry's [b:Claw Your Way to the Top 126036 Claw Your Way to the Top How to Become the Head of a Major Corporation in Roughly a Week Dave Barry https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1312045551s/126036.jpg 121387]. Also a wee bit too reductionist in the neuroscience (“If you do X, you will trigger serotonin release in your employees and life will be great”). But bring a few grains of salt with you because despite all that this is great material, well presented for a general audience, and the content might just help you grow into a better person.