249. Hunger Wins

At The Table with Patrick Lencioni

Patrick Lencioni

Pat, Business, Success, Work, Entrepreneurship, Companyculture, Patricklencioni, Teamwork, Leadership, Organizationalhealth, Culture, Management

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How can you create a workforce of hungry people who aren't trying to prove their worth by the number of hours they work? And how can you help your coworkers build a sense of ownership and passion around their work?

In episode 249 of At The Table, Pat and Cody explore why “hunger wins” when it comes to building competitive, effective teams. They challenge the misconception that long hours translate to productivity. They also reveal how to create sustainable competitiveness that inspires people to go above and beyond—without burning them out.

Topics explored in this episode:

(0:40) Hunger and Competitiveness

* Global trends and misconceptions about competitiveness, including China’s 996 work model.

(4:12) The Pitfalls of Overwork

* Why excessive hours lead to burnout and inefficiency.

(7:25) Hunger in Organizational Culture

* Hunger can’t be legislated or regulated—it must be built into culture.

* The importance of avoiding extremes, hiring the right people, and providing flexibility.

(10:09) Ownership and Sustainable Competitiveness

* How ownership fuels hunger and why pushing employees is sometimes necessary for growth.

(15:41) Hiring Right and Protecting Culture

* The importance of hiring competitive people and quickly addressing poor fits.

This episode of At The Table with Patrick Lencioni is brought to you by The Table Group: https://www.tablegroup.com. We teach leaders how to make work more effective and less dysfunctional. We also help their employees be more fulfilled and less miserable.

At The Table is a podcast that lives at the connection between work life, leadership, organizational health, and culture. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts (https://apple.co/4hJKKSL), Spotify (https://spoti.fi/4l1aop0), and YouTube (https://bit.ly/At-The-Table-YouTube).

Follow Pat Lencioni on https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-lencioni-orghealth and http://www.youtube.com/@PatrickLencioniOfficial.

Connect with Cody Thompson https://www.linkedin.com/in/cody-thompson-a5918850.

Be sure to check out our other podcast, The Working Genius Podcast with Patrick Lencioni, on Apple Podcasts (https://apple.co/4iNz6Yn), Spotify (https://spoti.fi/4iGGm8u), and YouTube (https://bit.ly/Working-Genius-YouTube).

Let us know your feedback via [email protected].

This episode was produced by Story On Media: https://www.storyon.co.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Higher slow means find people that really want to do a great job, you know, and that really have a strong work ethic, but not that want to prove to everybody else that they're willing to sacrifice their personal life completely.
0:17.5	Welcome to At the Table, the podcast that lives at the intersection between culture, teamwork, leadership, and organizational health.
0:24.7	I'm your host, Pat Lanchone. This is my co-host, Cody Thompson. How you doing, Cody?
0:29.0	I'm doing swell, Pat. Excited for this conversation. Me too, and it's the fourth time we're trying to record it because we keep messing up.
0:36.9	Four times the charm. What's the topic, Cody?
0:39.8	We're going to talk about hunger wins.
0:42.6	That's right.
0:44.2	And this is something that I've been noticing in my conversation with clients and reading I'm doing and talking to various people around the world.
0:52.0	There's a new emphasis on competitiveness.
0:54.7	Everybody's talking about we need to get more competitive.
0:56.9	And I don't know if that's because of all the tariff discussions
1:00.4	and all these countries trying to do business with one another,
1:03.9	or if it's because long corporate COVID is finally worn off
1:07.5	and people are like, okay, everybody's back at work.
1:09.2	We've got to figure out how to be more competitive. Whatever the reason people are talking about this across the world, in different parts of the country, in Europe, I've been talking to a lot of people, how do we get more competitive? And too often, they're talking about work hours as a surrogate for competitiveness and hunger. And I just don't think that's right.
1:28.7	Yeah, I love when you do this, Pat, where you're sort of surveying the business landscape,
1:33.0	you're hearing conversations from leaders, and then what they're saying and the solutions
1:38.8	that they think they're going to kind of entertain are kind of antithetical to the way like even our own
1:46.1	philosophy about business you know so often we're talking about efficiency versus effectiveness and
1:51.2	and what what is hunger and what do work hours have to do with production and productivity and
1:56.4	and so I love when we have these sort of uh you know, philosophical arguments around this, and we get to be grounded in sort of our way of looking at the world of work.
2:07.8	And so I'm excited to dive in.
	...

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