Simon Sinek: How to start a cultural transformation?

So this is the biggest mistake companies make when doing

cultural

transformation

s: they treat it like it's a marketing campaign where this is the right launch date and here are all the shows that we're going to make everyone go through and listen to all the powerpoints and listen everyone. the executives who are going to give the powerpoints nod their heads, yes, I'm doing something right and then it doesn't work or people resist or fight or don't show up or even sabotage and everything is well-intentioned, it's imperfect and sometimes we make mistakes in the

cultural

thing or at the wrong time, but everything is well-intentioned and fails and it is a big waste of time in a big waste of money and we are back to square one.

There is something called the law of diffusion. of innovations, this should become your best friend, okay, the bell curve, all populations always look at the standard deviation, if you have high performers, you always have low performers and then you have an average, always in this room there are a group of people I know who are nodding their heads saying yes, yes, yes, yes, there is a group of people who think I'm an idiot and like, I wasted my money, but most people think I'm open , yeah, this is interesting, I like something, you know, I know. I know getting in every time and the fact that everyone wanted to come and pay to be in and it's not an industry thing in general, so I know it's a little bit more one way or another, but it's still always the right standard deviation.

What the law of diffusion tells us is that the first two and a half percent of our population are innovators, people with great ideas, Steve Jobs, you know beyond Musk, then you have the next 12 to 13 percent of our population, our early adopters who are willing. sacrifice time, money and energy to be a part of something that reflects their own beliefs, they line up to see the new Star Wars for eight hours, even though you can go in a week, buy a ticket and go in, they thought it was a good use of time and money, then you have the following, the early majority, the late majority and your laggards, the only reason these people do anything is because they no longer have a choice, right?

What you are asking for in cultural

transformation

is as well as, do we change our company well? The problem is the problem is this this group of people the majority are cynical they are practical what do I gain from this? What do I get if it goes wrong? Will they pay me more if I have? staying up late you know they are cynical in their practice, they are right, these people are not so right, they will just do something because they think it is cool, they want to be a part of it, what the law of diffusion tells us is that it cannot be achieved .

Mass market success or resistance to a new idea until you achieve 15 to 18 percent market penetration. It is the turning point. It is a social phenomenon. If you ignore everything I tell you today about this, you will always get around 10 percent. That's what you'll get. I will say they just get it, we love them, they get it and 10% of the company will participate, it's not enough and this thing that Jeffrey Moore called the chasm, crossing the chasm is the magic gap and the way you get it you get it. it's that you don't talk to these people at all, you ignore them and you target these people only to early adopters because these people don't want to try something new until someone else has tried it first and let me tell you what it looks like.

Because I did, so in a large company there are many more people than in your company. 200,000 people wanted me to help them run a training program for millennials, so I said, "Great." I pull out my little pocket copy of the broadcast law because to me, this is religion, by the way, this is how I built my entire career. Remember that story I told you before. He convinced me why I should hire you. He told me he was here. He didn't tell me he was here. I could hear. which I ignored for now I'll catch it later right someone else will catch it later so this is what we did what the company wanted to do was traditional they wanted me to design the program we'll release it we'll do it In the videos, I'd be on the videos and then we will have the training program and we will force all the Millennials to go through the training program.

It's going to be amazing and I'm thinking it's going to fail, so this is it. What I said, I said I'll do a workshop once and we'll make it open only to anyone born after 1984, which means if you were born before 1984 you're not eligible, that keeps out all the top executives so they can't. come and look, make sure the people who come in only have a hundred hundred seats, a hundred and twenty-five seats, and you have to apply because I want people to put in extra time and energy and the problem with the Internet is We've made everything easy, let's try to do everything easiest possible, click, click, click, click, no, I want to make things a little difficult, so they had to complete a proper essay and submit it, and we actually read them all and were able to find out who was calling and we were able to tell who really wanted to be there and we selected a hundred people and we only did it from the East Coast offices just because it was convenient for us to do it.

New York, I was on the east coast in New York and Virginia, just because it was easier, maybe some of the other offices, actually it was also Chicago and all that, in all the offices I gave this wonderful workshop and at the end of I said : Hey guys, we don't have a Millennial training program, we want to make one, so I'm asking for volunteers from this room to help build it. They won't get any extra money that they might have to work extra hours for. your own time and may or may not have this included in your compensation or promotion packages, whoever wants.

I had fifty volunteers who said they were going to help build this program for no extra money or any particular personal benefit, it's because they believed. Well, two weeks later, one of the top executives at the company calls me furious with me. He is so angry with me. You know why? because leaders from all over the country called him and yelled at him. Why don't we get a Millennial? training program why is it only on the west coast and I said congratulations that's called a lawsuit because everyone came back to work and said this is amazing right if I had done it the traditional way those same leaders would have called and yelled because I have to do it? give up my people for an hour and a half every week.

I'm busy, we don't need. This would have been the exact same answer, so you want to make a voluntary invitation a little bit difficult and invite them to help you build it because then it's grassroots in nature and now you're doing things from the top and the bottom, so the Formal corporate stuff is always voluntary and the bottom stuff comes from them and you help them and you give them resources and then you create a scenario where you can communicate with them and everyone can communicate with each other once a month on a conference call and everyone shares the best practices so that you can take something that works in one country and try it in another country and you will be able to learn from them and you will give them resources and over time I don't know how long and that is why companies don't like it this works 100% % I just don't know how long one year two years three years no I don't know, it depends on the company, it depends on the size, it depends on the culture, I don't know, it works a hundred percent, so if you're comfortable with the fact that it will work, we just don't know when your best moment will be. friend of your first adopters