The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant
The Highest Performance Strategy is Caring About People ft. Simon Sinek
18 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, Adam.
Hey, Renee.
I'm excited about this episode.
Me too.
Yeah, we have our first guest for you this episode. Adam will tell you all about our guest and our conversation. Before we get there, I want to let you know we are coming. This is the close to season one. It has been a wild ride. We are so grateful to y'all for being on the ride with us. We're taking a hiatus for five weeks now.
During those five weeks, we're bringing you some best of podcasts that we think you'll really enjoy. And then we'll be back on July 30th with new episodes, including some really fun guests. We're going to try something new and interview some folks and then talk about what we're learning from our guests.
So excited, but really, really want to make sure I'm clear that we're both so grateful for y'all coming to the Curiosity Shoppe. and hanging out with us and learning with us. It's been really fun.
It has been. And speaking of fun, we're very excited to bring you a special conversation that we recorded at Brilliant Minds in Stockholm. It was last week with our friend Simon Sinek. If you don't already know Simon, he's an ethnographer, TED talker, author of books like Start With Why and The Infinite Game. He's also a podcaster and an optimist.
We had a great conversation about the state of work in organizations, about how to build strong teams, how to get the most out of leaders. And we also got to do a live Q&A with leaders from around the world. Enjoy.
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Chapter 2: How do leaders today describe the state of organizations?
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Welcome to The Curiosity Shop. A show from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Hi, everybody. We are in Stockholm, and we are at the Brilliant Minds Conference, joined by none other than Simon Sinek. Welcome to The Curiosity Shop.
Nice to be here. We're excited. Thank you. Me too. You're the first guest ever.
Ever.
I remember you told me. You said, would you be our first guest? And I was very excited to say yes.
I have questions for all of us and we're going to round robin them. So here's my thinking. The three of us have spent our careers inside organizations and working with leaders, but we do it in very different ways. So you build very deep and lasting relationships with leaders. You're with them over time. You are very relational in your work.
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Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from military culture about leadership?
So we all have very different interactions, but do very similar work. So I want to start with this question, and we'll go first to you. State of the org, globally, how would you describe what you're seeing today?
Look, the good news is that there is demand for our work. There shouldn't. I agree. No, no, but I mean it like there shouldn't be. That's true. Right? And none of us would have careers in the 80s or 90s. There would be no demand for what we do in that time period. And I think that there's a sort of mass rebellion around the world against capitalism.
but it's the form of capitalism that exists now, the sort of Milton Friedman, Jack Welch form of capitalism of short-termism and using people to balance the books and rewarding shareholders before you take care of your employees or your customers. That's the form of capitalism that exists now that we all don't like and rebel against.
And the good news is there's a movement afoot where either enlightened leaders or younger leaders want that more human form of capitalism back. And the problem is there's still a lot of pressure for the old form. And so the trend that I'm seeing right now and the questions that I'm getting the most questions for is transformation. How do we go from this to that?
And the most common question I get is what do you do when your boss is against all of the stuff we talk about? It's the most common question I get. The good news is we're seeing the demand for change for the way we do business coming from the middle, and they want to be change agents inside their own organizations rather than just say, I'm out of here and quit and go somewhere else.
But transformation is the topic. How to do it, how to do it in a way that doesn't create excessive pushback, rebellion, how to do it in a way that is considerate, but at the same time responsible to the business model. They still have to keep the doors open. And so, yeah, that's the thing.
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Chapter 4: How can leaders effectively manage their nervous systems?
But I'm proud of the fact that the three of us are on the front lines of this movement.
I love that framing. And I have to say, I think work would have been bleak for us during Welchian times. It would have been nonexistent. Yeah, I think, you know, and what I mean by that is during a period of time when performance and humanity were cast as mutually exclusive.
I think. So true story. I did some work back in the day, long ago before this form of my career. I did some work for a division of GE, GE silicones. And I'll leave out all the long stuff, but I came in with some recommendations on how to re-understand loyalty. And it was all about humanity and rewarding people for actual loyalty, not just how much they spend, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And the guy who ran the division, he was great. He said, Simon, this is great work, and I think you've made some excellent recommendations, and I agree with what you're suggesting, and I just want you to know that we will implement none of it. And he says, because you have to understand, if I implement your stuff, I don't get a bonus. So great work not doing it.
And they were very honest and open about it.
It was very straightforward. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Very honest and open about it. Yeah. So even if there was appreciation for the work, the incentive structure, they're just not going to implement it.
Yeah. Charlie Munger, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Yeah. Yeah. Adam, state of the org.
Oh. I think there are two things that jump out at me. The first one is a lot of leaders pushing their employees to adopt AI while at the same time planning to do major job cuts in the next two to five years and not telling anybody. I think that's a travesty.
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Chapter 5: What role does empathy play in leadership and organizational success?
And I think it's a mistake, too. I think there's no substitute for human ingenuity and human judgment. And I think a lot of these leaders, to Simon's point, are being very short-sighted in just assuming they can get rid of a bunch of people just because we have LLMs now.
um that's probably the first one the second one i'm seeing is related to that accusations of hypocrisy constantly by i hear it from my students i hear it from junior people in the organizations i go and visit they say we were told that we had a voice and then we brought concerns we brought ideas and nobody listened or did a thing so what was all of that lip service to inclusion what does it mean you obviously didn't care
So the AI thing is funny. You've got all these organizations laying off significant numbers of people claiming that AI can do the job of these people, which is complete nonsense. It's because they overhired.
And if they come out to the marketplace and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we overhired, so now we need to correct because we're carrying too much expense on the books, then their stock price would go down because they were idiots. But if they say I'm laying off thousands of people because AI can do their jobs, which is not true. AI can't do that yet. Not for that quantity of people.
We have the data that support that.
It just can't. But they say to the market, AI, and then they look like they're on the cutting edge. So their stock price goes up. But the problem is they are creating the narrative for AI. So now you have mass fear that AI is taking my job, which is not true.
But these decisions, but more importantly, the narratives they're putting out to protect their own short-term gains is creating a narrative that is creating the rebellion against AI. They don't realize the long-term damage they're doing for the adoption of a very important technology. So what do you both make then of, I feel like every third post on LinkedIn says, your job won't be taken by AI.
It'll be taken by someone using AI.
Somebody got a good tagline and went hard. I mean... I think, so I'm going to, someone just in marketing went hard and it was great. It's a meme. It's a good line. It's a good line. As a writer, we're like, we give you an A plus on the line. We give you a D minus on the message, but an A plus on the line.
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Chapter 6: How does shame affect parenting and leadership?
But high fastballs, little kicks, falling over.
Okay, so that makes me wonder, should we have team captains in organizations? Not formal leaders or managers, but somebody who's respected by their colleagues.
They happen organically. I guess they're culture carriers.
It happens organically. Yeah.
And I think the minute you label them that, they cease to lose their authority and power as informal player leaders. As soon as you put the armband on, things change. But I think... I think that's the first time in my career I've seen people willing to not even pretend they know what's... Because you wake up, what's the American fever dream today? Tariffs. What is it tomorrow? Straight-up Hormuz.
It's like people don't have... It's not even... It's too fast and too much. Well, the good leaders are saying that out loud. That's the difference.
The good leaders aren't pretending that they got it all under control. The good leaders are being like, whoa, another one? And you're saying sort of the high and fast coming at their head, that they're just honest about it and they're looking to the team to help.
I love it.
That's exactly, yeah. Guys, I don't know. I don't know. And it's so uncertain, but I'm open to suggestions and I'm looking for help. And let's experiment. If it doesn't work, we'll pivot. And the willingness to try and not be the final decision.
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Chapter 7: What is the impact of AI on job roles and organizational dynamics?
I'm not going to innovate at all. And I think those leaders end up doing a ton of micromanaging because they focus on the little things they can control, not realizing in this sea of uncertainty, their job is actually to be macro managers, not micromanagers, to help people make sense of the change that's happening, or at least be honest about the fact that they don't have the answers yet.
And I think most leaders have not been trained in how to do that. Brene, I love your point about regulating a nervous system as a core leadership capability. Can you talk to us about how leaders can learn to do that? Because I see at least six dysregulated people in this room right now. No.
I would be one, so it would just be five of y'all. It's a skill set. I mean, it's when I was doing the research for Strong Ground, I really wanted to come up with a cluster of skills that were, how do we future ready people? And I was really hoping it would be a great number, like eight or 10. And it ended up being 38. And I divided- Nice round number. Nice round number.
And you know, as a writer, that shit sucks. Like you're like- Welcome to the impossible cluster of future ready leadership. The good thing is I use a lot of gym metaphors, like strength training metaphors. And I said, you know, this is 38, but we have five or six kettlebells that'll hit 15 of them at one time. So we got it.
But what I was surprised that emerged at the top, which I call the core, was five that I, again, did not want to be true because they're the ones that we would have never been working in the 80s. The first one, self-awareness. The second, metacognition. Do you understand how you learn and how you think? Three, emotional regulation and emotional awareness. Four, mindfulness, which,
Don't you hate saying it though? Do you hate saying it? I don't use it. I don't use it either. Wait, you just did. I know, but like, what am I supposed to do? Like lie? It's the data. So I was going to call it paying attention because that's what the term I use.
But it's so funny because how many of you in here would love to have a lecture from someone come into your organization about mindfulness? Like if I walked in and I saw that like up on a deck, I'd be like, dude, I got shit to do. I can't like, there's a butterfly and the grass is green.
This is a failure. This is a failure of that market, right? Because like when I started my work, I couldn't talk about purpose at work. That was hippy dippy stuff. Purpose? No, no. When I started, if you use the term purpose at work, literally I got, there's a small percentage who were already converted.
But if I wanted to move the needle, literally, that's like, like you said, I want to come and talk about purpose at your office. They'd be like, thanks, hippie. No, you know? And so part of my journey. They thought you were selling drugs.
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Chapter 8: How can organizations create a culture of care and connection?
Yeah. So part of my journey was language. And so the reason I called it the why, the reason I called it the why is because I went around and asked people who believed mission was preeminent or vision was preeminent or purpose was preeminent or brand was preeminent. We had all these different words, but nobody agreed on the definitions of these words.
and i went to all the people who thought all of these things were the most important thing and asked them what's the definition and they all said it's why we do what we do it's why we get out of bed it's why the company exists i'm like great we'll call it the why we can all agree and it was the term the why that allowed the concept to then come into work because people weren't afraid of talking about their company's why they were afraid of talking about their company's purpose and so i think the same thing goes for mindfulness which is the problem is it sounds like hippy dippy stuff and so you have these people screaming and yelling from the treetop saying you have to do it
But they aren't doing marketing 101 and finding language for the thing that the people actually want. Rather, they're bringing the thing that they think is important. And so we do need new language for mindfulness. And then maybe in 10 years, we can talk about mindfulness and it won't be a big deal. I don't know what that term is, but we do need more. We need different words.
Synonymous, it's synonymous with paying attention, right?
I actually love the attention frame because we're all facing an attention crisis right now. Yeah, being fully attentive, whatever word we use it, but I think attention is in the right ballpark for sure.
Yeah, I can't convert that. This is one of the words. I mean, I was successful in converting shame as a word. So, I mean, like in the beginning, people were like, can we call it chame? I mean, how many of you follow sports, any sport? How many of you watch the French Open? You don't think those folks have very serious mindfulness trainers?
Oh, I saw a thing about tennis. I can't remember the exact numbers, but something like of the hundred top players, it's always the top 15 or 20 that are always the top 15 or 20. It's not like other sports where it like bounces around a lot. It's always the top. It's a very narrow band of always the top.
And so the question was asked, how is it the narrow band is always the narrow band when all the players have access to the same training, nutrition, coaches, it's an equal game for all of them. What is it about these top few? And I can't remember who did the research, I'm on brand.
I can't remember who did the research, but what he found was that these top few, all of them, had a different mindset than everybody else. And the mindset was absolute love and joy of the game. So if they won a point, they would say, oh, I love this game. And if they lost a point, they'd be like, lost this time, but wait for the next one.
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