People come before money - Simon Sinek

 I'm an idealist, I sort of imagined a world that's different to the world that we live in. Now, I imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired to go to work feel safe when they're there and return home at the end of the day fulfilled by the work that they do and I believe this thing called fulfillment the ability to say that I love my work that I love what I do I believe that it is a basic human right and not a privilege.

We treat it as a privilege you know you go out with your friends and somebody says I love my job and the rest of us go oh my god you're so lucky like it's a lottery that they had won or something and and so I just believe that fundamentally that we as the workforce are we have the right to demand that the places where we work provide us that the irony is it's actually good for them that's the big joke we're more engaged when we offer more discretionary effort we offer our big ideas simply because they said come here and enjoy yourself and feel safe and have a good time and let us help you grow many of the traditional business practices that are considered normal today are left over from the 1980s and 90s remember the 80s and 90s were boom years.

Most companies grew it was a time of relative peace and it was a kinder gentler cold war we weren't practicing hiding under our desks in school and a lot of the business philosophies that were being espoused and proposed were for those times so the concept of shareholder supremacy for example was a theory proposed from Harvard in the late 1970s just a theory the concept of using mass layoffs to balance the books was a practice that did not exist in the United States prior to the 1980s did not exist right the concepts of rank and yank where you stack your employees based on the performance and their contribution to the stock price you fight you you promote the top 10% and fire the bottom 10% and you create an environment in which people compete against each other inside the company right by the way.

That's what dictators do you keep the people divided and you stay in power because dictators fear the people right so say it's the same thing these are all fantastically good theories for boom years and for the short term we also dismantle glass-steagall in this time period it's not a Republican or Democrat thing because you had Republican and Democrat president over this period and glass-steagall was the act that was passed after the Great Depression to prevent another Great Depression from happening amongst other things one of the things that did was it prohibited investment banks and retail banks existing in the same institution which is what was allowed prior to the Great Depression, right.

Do you know how many stock market crashes we had prior to the dismantling of glass-steagall zero we had zero stock market crashes for 50 years then they dismantled glass-steagall in the 1980s and 90s and we had the the 2009 I was at 87 dot-com crash and 2008 we've had three right but it was really leaders like Jack Welch who promoted these theories of the day for a very different time and they have become so normal today that we don't actually realize how backwards they are we talked about layoffs that we announced them on the news as if it's nothing in fact worse when a company announces layoffs the stock price goes up and if you're incentivized based on stock value uh-huh a few years ago Citibank announced record high layoffs the exact same year that they announced record high average bonuses figure that one out right.

The point is is these systems though they may be normal are wrong and broken and go completely contrary to the basic human right that we all are entitled and by the way GE needed a 300 billion dollar bailout in 2008 because the theories that they espouse are not good for the long-term they are good for the short-term so for me to meet a company like next jump a company that when they talk about growth they mean their people not their bottom line and a company that understands though money is important it is the fuel for the organization of course money is important because the more money you have the more fuel you have to make.

The organization run this isn't it's not a hippie commune but the point is is that people come before not money I sit in the audience's of lots of corporate events I've never met a CEO on the planet that doesn't believe people are important the problem is the decisions they make would be contrary to the things they say they stand there with their list of priorities and it says number one priority growth number two priority shareholder value number three priority customer number four priority employee see our people are important number four even when they say customer first that means your employee is least number two, right.

The irony is when you take care of your employees your employees take care of your customers your customers take care of your shareholders and then and the big joke is that the numbers prove it the numbers prove it you look at people focus companies they outperform numbers focus companies over the long term dramatically GE versus Costco Costco year after year after year criticized by Wall Street for having stuck a flat stock price but if you compare the price of Costco stock to GE over the course of the past thirty years you'll see that GE made 600 percent of its money.

When the same year that if you if you invested the years at Costco in public would I say six hundred percent S&P 500 600 percent Costco twelve hundred percent double 2x it's good for the shareholder I can no longer be accused of being a crazy idealist if what I imagine exists in reality that's why companies like this are very very important for us to study do they have everything right of course not do they have a are they trending in the right direction absolutely are they compare the operating completely counter to what we consider to be normal business practice of the day.

You bet they are and here's the best part their numbers prove it so for all the cynics out there who believe that numbers matter numbers come first and performance comes before people guess what they outperform their competitors year after year of the year they surprise even themselves study that book and study this company because mark my words if we have anything to do with it in 10 or 20 years we will completely undo all the nonsense that basses like Jack Welch promoted in the 80s and 90s is that enough okay