Published on: October 30, 2026 at 8:00 am
In the book Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, author Simon Sinek argues that sustainable organizational success requires servant leadership and the creation of a “Circle of Safety” that protects employees from internal corporate intrigue, office politics, and stress. Drawing on military traditions and evolutionary biology, Sinek asserts that true leaders prioritize the security and well-being of their teams over short-term performance metrics, profitability, and personal rank. By fostering a high-trust culture that minimizes stress-induced cortisol and boosts collaborative neurochemicals such as serotonin, Sinek writes that organizations’ leaders can cultivate deep-seated employee loyalty, driving teams to naturally pull together and effectively confront external market challenges.
Academy of Management Scholar Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford University said he recommends that every leader and manager—whether in the public or private sector—should read that book.
“Simon Sinek has made a career out of writing a book and giving talks about his theme of Leaders Eat Last, arguing for why maybe leaders should eat last, and the best example, of course, is from the military, where leaders feed their troops before they feed themselves, but in corporate America these days, leaders don’t eat last,” Pfeffer said.
“Examples of the selfish, self-interested, unconstrained leaders are everywhere today—look at Elon Musk as another extreme example—but while Elon and Donald Trump get a lot of publicity and they’re certainly extreme, the idea that people do not need to take care of their citizens or customers, and, certainly, that they don’t have to take care of their employees is all too common,” he said. “Layoffs are now rampant, even in the tech industry, which is printing money, and even among other companies that have made kazillions of dollars.
“Profiteering, prioritizing profits and shareholders over all other stakeholders, and treating employees as expendable are not particularly new either,” he said. “They are a continuation of a trend that has been going on for a long time.”
