Leaders Eat Last

Johnny Bravo and the officers who eat last

Simon Sinek opens with Captain Mike Drowley, an A-10 pilot with the call sign Johnny Bravo, flying over Afghanistan in 2002. A team of special operations soldiers below him was in danger under heavy cloud. Drowley dropped through the clouds into a mountain valley at night, with no way to see the terrain, to protect them. Sinek asks why he did it. Drowley's own answer was that the soldiers on the ground would have done the same for him.

The title comes from the Marine Corps. In the chow line the most junior Marines eat first and the most senior officers eat last. No rule requires it. The Marines understand leadership as a responsibility to the people in your care, not a rank. Sinek's claim is that the same principle explains why some organizations have people who would run into danger for each other, and why most have people who hide, compete and protect themselves.

His model civilian leader is Bob Chapman, CEO of the manufacturer Barry-Wehmiller. When Chapman bought HayssenSandiacre, a packaging machine maker in South Carolina, he found a plant where office staff and factory workers lived under different rules. He removed the time clocks and the locks on the parts cages and told the plant to treat everyone like a trusted adult. In the 2008 recession, when orders fell by about 30 percent, Chapman refused to lay anyone off. Everyone took four weeks of unpaid leave instead. His line was that it was better for all to suffer a little than for some to suffer a lot. Employees started trading furlough weeks so that those who could afford it took more.

The Circle of Safety

Sinek's central image is the Circle of Safety. Every organization faces outside dangers: competitors, the economy, new technology, changing markets. Those dangers are constant and nobody can control them. What a leader controls is the conditions inside the organization. When people feel safe from each other, they spend their energy on the outside threats. When they fear layoffs, blame, politics or humiliation, they spend it protecting themselves, and the organization weakens from within.

He illustrates this with the Spartans, who punished a soldier for losing his shield but not for losing his helmet or breastplate. The helmet protected the soldier. The shield protected the man next to him. Sinek also cites the Whitehall studies of British civil servants, which found that workers in lower grades died earlier than their bosses. The cause was not the stress of responsibility at the top but the lack of control at the bottom. Feeling unsafe and powerless at work is, in his reading, a health risk.

Leaders decide who is inside the circle and how wide it is. A circle that covers only the executive floor produces an organization where everyone else is on their own.

Four chemicals and one stress hormone

The book's second part explains the biology Sinek uses throughout. He describes four chemicals that reward behavior that helped early humans survive:

• Endorphins mask physical pain. They produce the runner's high and let a hunter keep going.
• Dopamine rewards progress toward a goal. It is the hit you feel when you tick off a task, find food or hit a sales number. It is also the chemical behind addiction to alcohol, gambling, phones and metrics.
• Serotonin is the chemical of pride and status. It flows when others recognize us and when we take responsibility for them. Sinek calls it the leadership chemical. A graduation ceremony exists to produce it for the student and the parents at once.
• Oxytocin is the chemical of love, trust and friendship. It comes from physical contact, acts of generosity and time spent together. It builds slowly and lasts.

Endorphins and dopamine are the selfish chemicals: they reward individual effort. Serotonin and oxytocin are the selfless chemicals: they reward cooperation and keep groups together. Cortisol is the stress hormone that prepares the body to fight or flee. It is useful in a short burst and harmful as a constant state. It suppresses the immune system and shuts down empathy and oxytocin.

Sinek's diagnosis is that most modern companies run on dopamine. They reward hitting numbers, pay bonuses for short-term results and keep people on edge with the constant threat of job cuts. That produces cortisol all day and starves people of the trust chemicals. The result is burnout, politics and lower performance.

Abstraction and scale

The third part explains how good people come to harm others. Sinek retells Stanley Milgram's 1961 obedience experiment at Yale, in which about 65 percent of participants gave what they believed was a maximum, dangerous shock to a stranger in another room because an authority told them to. When the victim was in the same room, far fewer obeyed. Distance makes harm easy.

Companies create the same distance with abstraction. A layoff of 4,000 people is a line on a spreadsheet. Sinek argues that numbers let executives make decisions they could not make face to face. He offers rules for managing abstraction: keep it real by meeting people in person, keep groups manageable, and meet the people you help.

For group size he relies on Dunbar's number. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar found that humans maintain about 150 close relationships. Beyond that, people need rules and hierarchy to replace trust. Sinek's example is Bill Gore, founder of W. L. Gore & Associates, who built a new plant whenever a plant reached about 150 people rather than let any site outgrow its circle of safety.

How companies lost the circle

Sinek traces today's conditions to the baby boomers. Their parents, who lived through the Depression and the Second World War, built institutions on shared sacrifice. The boomers grew up in abundance, and by the 1980s they ran the country and its companies. Two events stand out for him. In 1981 President Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, which signaled that mass dismissal was a normal tool. In the same decade Jack Welch at General Electric cut tens of thousands of jobs in pursuit of shareholder value, an idea that Milton Friedman had argued for in 1970 and that Welch made the standard.

Layoffs went from a last resort to a routine way to hit quarterly numbers. Sinek calls the result destructive abundance: companies had more resources than ever and used them to chase results while the people who produced the results felt less safe every year.

Five lessons of leadership

The book's longest part sets out five lessons with contrasting cases.

So goes the culture, so goes the company. Goldman Sachs spent decades as a partnership that valued long-term client relationships. After it went public in 1999, the trading side took over, and in 2012 an executive named Greg Smith resigned in a public letter describing a culture that mocked its clients. The people changed when the culture changed.

So goes the leader, so goes the culture. Stanley O'Neal ran Merrill Lynch from an isolated executive floor, removed rivals and rode a private elevator. The firm took on huge mortgage risk with nobody willing to deliver bad news and nearly collapsed in 2008. Sinek contrasts him with leaders like Chapman, who walk the floor.

Integrity matters. Trust requires that leaders say what they mean. Sinek's example is Bank of America, which announced a monthly debit card fee in 2011, reversed it after public anger and then claimed it had been listening to customers all along. Nobody believed it.

Friends matter. Sinek describes how Congress stopped working together after the 1990s, when members were encouraged to spend less time in Washington and stopped eating and socializing with members of the other party. People who do not know each other cannot trust each other, and the chambers became places of permanent combat.

Lead the people, not the numbers. Costco's founder and CEO Jim Sinegal paid workers well above retail averages, covered most of their health insurance and refused Wall Street's demands to cut labor costs. Over the long run Costco's stock outperformed General Electric's under Welch. Sinek also tells of Captain David Marquet, who took command of the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear submarine with the worst morale in the fleet. Marquet stopped giving orders and had his officers say "I intend to" before each action. Responsibility spread through the crew, and the Santa Fe became one of the best-rated boats in the Navy.

A society of addicts

Sinek turns to dopamine addiction. Phones, email alerts and social media deliver the same small hits as a sales target, and the generation that grew up with them learned to expect constant reward. He warns that this produces people who struggle with patience, deep relationships and the slow work that oxytocin needs. Companies that run on performance metrics add to the problem. His prescription is to put real human contact back: meetings without phones, time spent with colleagues, and leaders who show up in person.

Becoming a leader

Leadership, in Sinek's account, is a choice rather than a rank. Anyone can decide to look after the people next to them. The cost of leadership is self-interest: leaders give up time, credit and comfort for the people in their care. The reward is a group that will give its own effort to see the leader's vision through. He closes with the Marine Corps again. Leaders eat last because they understand that the privilege of rank is a responsibility to the people, not a reward for the person who holds it.

What the critics say

Reviewers note that the four-chemical model simplifies neuroscience to the point where researchers object, and that the evidence for the book's claims is mostly anecdote. The chapter on younger workers and addiction reads to some as a lecture with little data. Several also point out that the Costco versus GE comparison picks one favorable period and that no study shows that Barry-Wehmiller's approach outperforms in general.

Who should read it

Read it if you manage people and want to understand why incentives and targets often produce fear instead of effort. It suits new managers, team leads and anyone who wants a language for trust at work. Readers who want hard evidence should treat the biology as a metaphor.