Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t

Bob Chapman is the former CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, a collection of companies that supply manufacturing services and technologies on a global scale. Sinek frames Chapman’s leadership style as being highly empathetic, building rapport by removing explicit and implicit barriers to trust. For instance, Chapman ordered the removal of fences and locks on spare manufacturing parts at his factories. Rather than dealing with extraneous steps, factory workers were trusted to do their work. Building trust was considered more important than the occasional missing part. Chapman ensured that his employees were treated equally across all levels of leadership, modeling the company culture after the notion of family. This notion comes up in an anecdote involving Chapman at a wedding ceremony. Just as a father ceremonially hands his daughter over to her spouse, so do parents with their company-bound children, hoping that any given workplace treats their daughters and sons with respect. Following this ideology, Chapman became an expert in shaping positive corporate culture, which in turn led to better tangible results for his companies.

Charlie Kim is the founder of Next Jump, an e-commerce company that boldly pioneered the concept of lifetime employment. Rather than firing someone for poor performance or even a costly mistake, Kim believes in leading people with a similar mindset to that of a parent. Parents don’t simply lay off their children when they make mistakes. Parents invest in their children, helping them learn from mistakes in order to become better, stronger people. Next Jump embodies this parallel on a daily basis, its hiring process being unconventional as well. Rather than focusing solely on years of experience and technical qualifications, Next Jump also evaluates a potential hire’s characteristics. By implementing this practice, Kim was able to cultivate a unique corporate culture, one in which fear and insecurity were replaced with openness and learning.

Jack Welch was an American executive who most notably served as the CEO of General Electric (GE) for 20 years. Sinek casts Welch as the antithetical model to his book’s ideal type of leadership. Welch was known for performing an annual ritual of firing the bottom 10% of GE managers while the top 20% were rewarded with stock options. Even today, the “Welch Way” is seen by many on Wall Street as a sound practice for maximizing profits regardless of its toll on corporate culture and morale. Within Welch’s model, there is an intrinsic sense of competition as managers try to avoid the bottom 10%. Welch’s model also fails to provide a foundational set of values—and without these values, there can be no lasting legacy. If profit is the only value a company has, its ability to adapt and weather financial crises is fundamentally jeopardized: “Welch and others [...] pioneered using people as an expendable resource to the benefit of investors” (213).