Simon Sinek: How to start a cultural transformation?

so here's the biggest mistake companies make when they're doing cultural transformations they treat it like it's a marketing campaign where here's the launch date right and here are all the programs we're gonna make everybody go through and hear all the powerpoints and hear all the executives that are gonna give the powerpoints you're nodding yes I'm getting something right right and then it doesn't work or people are resistant or fight or don't show up or even sabotage and it's all well intended it's imperfect and sometimes we get the cultural thing wrong or the timing wrong but

it's all well intended and it falls flat and it's a big waste of time in a big waste of money and we're right back where we started right there's something called a law of diffusion of innovations this must be come your best friend okay the bell curve all populations always sift across the standard deviation if you have high performers you have low performance always and then you have an average always in this room there's a group of people I know who are nodding their heads going yep yep yep yep there's a group of people who

think I'm an idiot and I like I wasted my money but most people are like I'm open yeah this is interesting I like some of it you know I know that I know that going in every single time and the fact that you all wanted to come and pay to be and it's not a general industry thing then I know that it's just a little more one way or the other but it's still the standard deviation always right what does what the law of diffusion tells us is that the first two and a half percent

of our population are innovators big idea people Steve Jobs you know beyond musk then you have the next 12 to 13 percent of our population our early adopters who are willing to sacrifice time money and energy to be a part of something that reflects their own beliefs they stand in line to see the new Star Wars for eight hours even though you can just go in a week and just buy a ticket and go in they thought that was a good use of time and money right then you have the next the early majority the

late majority and your laggards the only reason these people do something is because they have no choice anymore right what you're asking for in cultural transformation is this how do we change our company right the problem is the problem is is this this group of people the majority they're cynical they're practical what's in it for me what do I get if it goes wrong are you gonna pay me extra if I have to stay late you know they're cynical in their practical right these people not so much right they'll just do something because they think

it's great they want to be a part of it what the law of diffusion tells us is that you cannot achieve mass-market success or stickiness for a new idea until you achieve 15 to 18 percent market penetration it is the tipping point it is a social phenomenon if you ignore everything I tell you today about this you will always get about 10% that's what you'll say they just get it we love them they get it and 10% of the company is gonna be all in it's not enough and so this that Jeffrey Moore called the

chasm crossing the chasm is the magical gap and the way you get it you get it is you don't talk to these people at all you ignore them and you aim at these people only the early adopters because these people do not want to try something new until someone else has tried it first and let me tell you how it looks cuz I've done it so I a large company many many more people than is in your company 200,000 people wanted me to help them do a millennial training program so I said great I pull

out my little pocket copy of the law of diffusion because to me this is religion by the way this is how I built my entire career remember that story I told you before it convinced me why I should hire you he told me he was over here he didn't tell me he was over here I could hear that I ignored him for now I'll get him later right someone else will get him later so here's what we did what the company wanted to do was traditional they wanted me to design the program we're gonna launch

it we're gonna make videos there were me to be on the videos and then we're gonna have the training program and we're gonna force all the Millennials to go through the training program it'll be amazing and I'm thinking it's gonna fail so this is what I said I said I'm gonna do one workshop once and we will make it open to anybody born after 1984 only which means if you were born before 1984 you're not eligible that keeps all the senior executives out so they can't come and watch make sure and the people who come

in we only have a hundred and 100 seats a hundred twenty-five seats and they have to apply because I want people to put in extra time and extra energy and and the problem with the Internet is we've made everything easy let's try and make everything as so easy as possible click click click click click you're in no I want to make things a little bit difficult right so they had to fill out a proper essay and submit it and we actually read all of them and we could tell who was phoning it in and we

could tell who actually genuinely wanted to be there and we selected a hundred a hundred people and we only did it from the East Coast offices just because it was convenience we did New York he was on the East Coast in New York and Virginia right just because it was easier maybe a few of the other offices actually it was also Chicago and all that whatever a bunch of the offices I gave this wonderful workshop and at the end of it I said hey guys we don't have a Millenial training program we want to do

one so I'm asking for volunteers from this room to help build it you're not gonna get any extra money you might have to work extra hours on your own time and you may or may not have this included in your compensation or promotion packages at all who wants in I had fifty volunteers who said that they were gonna help build this program for no additional money and no particular personal benefit it's because they believed in it right two weeks later one of the senior executives in the company calls me up furious at me he's so

angry at me do you know why because leaders from across the entire country were calling up screaming at him why don't we get a Millenial training program why is it only on the west coast and I said congratulations that's called demand because they all went back to work and said this is amazing right had I done a traditional way those same leaders would have called up and yelled why do I have to give up my people for an hour and a half every week I am busy we don't need this would have been the exact

same response so you want to make it slightly difficult an invitation voluntary and invite them to actually help you build it because then it has a grassroots nature and so now you're doing things from the top and the bottom so you have the formal corporate stuff always voluntary and the stuff from the bottom coming from them and you help them and you give them resources and then you create a scenario where you can check in with them and they can all check in with each other once a month on a conference call and all share

best practices so that you can take something that's working in one country and try it in another country and you will learn from them and you'll give them resources and in time I don't know how long and this is why companies don't like this it 100% works I just don't know how long one year two year three years I don't know it depends on the company depends on the size depends on the culture I don't know in a hundred percent works so if you're comfortable the fact that it'll work we just don't know when this

is your best friend your early adopters [Music]