Simon Sinek in the video “The Rise of Selfishness” says that there's a distinct lack of good leadership in the world today, in politics as well as in corporate sector, and it's not a sudden thing. There's been a steady drumbeat, we've been moving in this direction for quite so many years, amazingly, you can actually trace it back to the mid-late 1970s where it first started. There was an economist by the name of Milton Friedman who proposed a theory of the responsibility of business, that the responsibility of business was to maximize profit, which means that the business only existed to make money. That was a new idea and a new theory that a business had a responsibility primarily to its owners i.e the shareholders. After that, we started to see the rise of this new concept of shareholder supremacy, which means, we prioritize the wants, needs, and desires of an external constituency over a customer and an employee. This is the exact same idea where a coach is trying to build a good team by trying to appease the fans while ignoring the players but for whatever reasons the theory was very appealing and leaders started to experiment with these ideas.
This idea of shareholders supremacy was popularized in the 80s and 90s by leaders like Jack Welch from general electric and those like him, the use of mass layoffs to balance the books did not exist prior to the 1980s. The 80s and the 90s were the boom years where it was much easier to make money and so we became a very selfish society where money became the thing and we saw this steady drumbeat of the rise of selfishness. Along with the rise of selfishness, over the course of time, those same people made their way into leadership positions as they got older and got promoted. Before we knew it, we had our governments, our politics, our corporations filled with people who were raised on this very finite selfish-minded kind of leadership and that's where we find ourselves today.
He further says that “It's embarrassing that I have a career, I talk about trust and cooperation, there should be no demand for my work, but the fact that there is demand for my work means that people recognize that the environments in which they are working are uncomfortable and they want to change, they want something different”. People have started to speak out and there is a sea change. It took us 30 years to get to where we are now and it's going to take us 20 or 30 years to unwind. We still have some time to go, but the good news is that we're marching in the right direction, we're talking about good leadership, we're starting to reject the leadership of the past. We no longer admire Jack Welch, he has fallen off his pedestal, these are all good steps in the right direction.
