Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
- Publisher: Portfolio, 2014
- Genre: Business, Psychology
- Format: Hardcover
- Page Count: 368 pages
- My Rating: ⭐⭐ (2/5)
The reason that I borrowed this book from my local library to read was because of Sinek’s ‘Millennials in the Workspace’ interview. As a millennial myself, even though I may not agree with him, I still consider him an interesting person who was brave enough to point out some of the problems and organise them into the short speech that subsequently went viral over the Internet. Naturally, I decided to read his book for more understanding of Sinek.
Still, I do not agree with the author on many occasions throughout the book. This was mostly due to Simon trying too hard to get his theories science-backed, which only made them more cringy. However, there are still some things worth mentioning:
- Circle of Safety: One can only feel proud of being a member of a group when safety is granted in that organisation, i.e. there are no dangers within and that people face dangers outside together.
- Abstraction Kills & Abundance Destroys: Many companies aim for better performance by checking the numbers and statistics, the abstraction of real human beings, rather than focus on their initial goal of making people’s lives better. ‘Abundance can be destructive because it abstracts the value of things. The more we have, the less we seem to value what we’ve got.’
- Leaders: Leaders define the culture of a company, and hence the future of the company. Over time, empowering ones lead better-performing teams than directive ones. ‘Leadership is not a license to do less; it is a responsibility to do more.’
We need a vision of the world that does not yet exist.
I would say this was an okay book that was not particularly informative, though not a complete waste of time, either. [10 Dec 2017]
