Start With Why
Being a leader requires 'followers' only, those who volunteer to go where you are going rather than being incentivized to, threatened to, or having to. And leadership requires a vision of the world that does not yet exist and the ability to communicate it. The former is the tangible result of what the world would like if we spent every day pursuing WHY, due to the power of WHY in inspiring action. The inspirational book 'Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action' written by Simon Sinek explores this concept deeply, arguing that the most successful and inspiring leaders communicate from the inside out—starting with their 'Why' (purpose or belief), then 'How' (process), and finally 'What' (product or service). This is a very inspiring book to read, for any type of leaders who is pursuing profound fulfillment.
Below are the quotations I've selected from the book.
Manipulations are the norm, but the better alternative is inspiration.
Beyond the business world, manipulations are the norm in politics today as well. Just as manipulations can drive a sale but not create loyalty, so too can they help a candidate get elected, but they don't create a foundation for leadership. Leadership requires people to stick with you through thick and thin. Leadership is the ability to rally people not for a single event, but for years. In business, leadership means that customers will continue to support your company even when you slip up.
Manipulative techniques have become such a mainstay in American business today that it has become virtually impossible for some to kick the habit. Like any addiction, the drive is not to get sober, but to find the next fix faster and more frequently. And as good as the short-term highs may feel, they have a deleterious impact on the long-term health of an organization. Addicted to the short-term results, business today has largely become a series of quick fixes added on one after another after another.
Leaders who choose to inspire people rather than manipulate people follow the concept of 'The Golden Circle'.
The Golden Circle is an alternative perspective to existing assumptions about why some leaders and organizations have achieved such a disproportionate degree of influence.
This alternative perspective is not just useful for changing the world; there are practical applications for the ability to inspire, too. It can be used as a guide to vastly improve leadership, corporate culture, hiring, product development, sales, and marketing. It even explains loyalty and how to create enough momentum to turn an idea into a social movement.
Companies try to sell us WHAT they do, but we buy WHY they do it. This is what I mean when I say they communicate from the outside in; they lead with WHAT and HOW. When communicating from inside out, however, the WHY is offered as the reason to buy and the WHATs serve as the tangible proof of that belief. The things we can point to rationalize or explain the reasons we're drawn to one product, company or idea over another.
When the WHY is absent, imbalance is produced and manipulations thrive. And when manupulations thrive, uncertainty increases for buyers, instability increases for sellers and stress increases for all.
Biologically, the limbic brain drives behaviors (decisions). Great leaders win hearts before minds.
We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe, and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us. Those whom we consider great leaders all have an ability to draw us close and to command our loyalty. And we feel a strong bond with those who are also drawn to the same leaders and organizations.
The newest area of the brain, our Homo Sapien brain, is the neocortex, which corresponds with the WHAT level. The neocortex is responsible for rational and analytical thought and language. The middle two sections comprise the limbic brain. The limbic brain is responsible for all of our feelings, such as trust and loyalty. It's also responsible for all human behavior and all our decision making, but it has no capacity for language.
When we communicate from the outside in, when we communicate WHAT we do first, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information, like facts and features, but it does not drive behavior. But when we communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain allows us to rationalize those decisions.
Our limbic brain is powerful, powerful enough to drive behavior that sometimes contradicts our rational and analytical understanding of a situation. We often trust our gut, even if the decision flies in the face of all the facts and figures. Richard Restak, a well-known neuroscientist, talks about this in his book, The Naked Brain. When you force people to make decisions with only the rational part of their brain, they almost invariably end up 'overthinking.' These rational decisions tend to take longer to make, says Restak, and can often be of lower quality. In contrast, decisions made with the limbic brain, gut decisions, tend to be faster, higher-quality decisions.
Our limbic brains are smart and often know the right thing to do. It is our inability to verbalize the reasons that may cause us to doubt ourselves or trust the empirical evidence when our gut tells us not to.
People don't buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. A failure to communicate WHY creates nothing but stress or doubt.
Those decisions started with WHY - the emotional component of the decision - and then the rational components allowed the buyer to verbalize or rationalize the reasons for their decision.
Great leaders are those who trust their gut. They are those who understand the art before the science. They win hearts before minds. They are the ones who start with WHY. "I can make a decision with 30 percent of the information, " said former Secretary of State Colin Powell. "Anything more than 80 percent is too much." There is always a level at which we trust ourselves or those around us to guide us, and don't always feel we need all the facts and figures.
Our hope, dreams, hearts, and guts drive us to try new things, not logic or facts.
If we were all rational, there would be no small businesses, there would be no exploration, there would be very little innovation and there would be no great leaders to inspire all those things. It is the undying belief in something bigger and better that drives that kind of behavior.
In reality, their purchase decision and their loyalty are deeply personal. They don't really care about Apple; it's all about them.
Products are not just symbols of what the company believes, they also serve as symbols of what the loyal buyers believe.
Products with a clear sense of WHY give people a way to tell the outside world who they are and what they believe.
Clarity of WHY, discipline of HOW, and Consistency of WHAT are all needed.
Ask the best salesmen what it takes to be a great salesman. They will always tell you that it helps when you really believe in the product you're selling... When salesmen actually believe in the thing they are selling, then the words that come out of their mouths are authentic. When belief enters the equation, passion exudes from the salesman. It is this authenticity that produces the relationships upon which all the best sales organizations are based. Relationships also build trust. And with trust comes loyalty. Absent a balanced Golden Circle means no authenticity, which means no strong relationships, which means no trust. And you're back at square one selling on price, service, quality or features. You are back to being like everyone else. Worse, without that authenticity, companies resort to manipulation: pricing, promotions, peer pressure, fear, take your pick. Effective? Of course, but only for the short term.
If they buy something that doesn't clearly embody their own sense of WHY, then those around them have little evidence to paint a clear and accurate picture of who they are. The human animal is a social animal. We're very good at sensing subtleties in behavior and judging people accordingly. We get good feelings and bad feelings about companies, just as we get good feelings and bad feelings about people. There are some people we just feel we can trust and others we just feel we can't.
Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that the driver of behaviors is anything but self-gain.
Trust is not a checklist. Fulfilling all your responsibilities does not create trust. Trust is a feeling, not a rational experience. We trust some people and companies even when things go wrong, and we don't trust others even though everything might have gone exactly as it should have. A completed checklist does not guarantee trust. Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own self-gain.
Those who lead are able to do so because those who follow trust that the decisions made at the top have the best interests of the group at heart. In turn, those who trust work hard because they feel like they are working for something bigger than themselves.
When people come to work with a higher sense of purpose, they find it easier to weather hard times or even to find opportunity in those hard times. People who come to work with a clear sense of WHY are less prone to giving up after a few failures because they understand the higher cause.
Finding the people who believe what you believe
We do better in cultures in which we are good fits. We do better in places that reflect our own values and beliefs. Just as the goal is not to do business with anyone who simply wants what you have, but to do business with people who believe what you believe, so too is it beneficial to live and work in a place where you will naturally thrive because your values and beliefs align with the values and beliefs of that culture.
When employees belong, they will guarantee your success. And they won't be working hard and looking for innovative solutions for you, they will be doing it for themselves.
As Herb Kelleher famously said, "you don't hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills."
The truth is, almost every person on the planet is passionate; we are not all passionate for the same things.
The goal is to hire those who are passionate for your WHY, your purpose, cause or belief, and who have the attitude that fits your culture.
Great companies don't hire skilled people and motivate them; they hire already motivated people and inspire them.
If those inside the organization are a good fit, the opportunity to "go the extra mile", to explore, to invent, to innovate, to advance, and more importantly, to do so again and again and again, increases dramatically. Only with mutual trust can an organization become great.
The Law of Diffussion
Our population is broken into five segments that fall across a bell curve: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards.
Early adopters are willing to pay a premium or suffer some level of inconvenience to own a product or espouse an idea that feels right. Their willingness to suffer an inconvenience or pay a premium had less to do with how great the product was and more to do with their own sense of who they are. They wanted to be the first.
The farther right you go on the curve, the more you will encounter the clients and customers who may need what you have, but don't necessarily believe what you believe. As clients, they are the ones for whom, no matter how hard you work, it's never enough. Everything usually boils down to price with them. They are rarely loyal. They rarely give referrals and sometimes you may even wonder out loud why you still do business with them, "They just don't get it," our gut tells us. The importance of identifying this group is so that you can avoid doing business with them.
There is an irony to mass-market success, as it turns out. It's near impossible to achieve if you point your marketing and resources to the middle of the bell, if you attempt to woo those who represent the middle of the curve without first appealing to the early adopters. It can be done, but at a massive expense. This is because the early majority, according to Rogers, will not try something until someone else has tried it first. The early majority, indeed the entire majority, needs the recommendation of someone else who has already sampled the product or service.
That's what a manipulation is. They may buy, but they won't be loyal. Don't forget, loyalty is when people are willing to suffer some inconvenience or pay a premium to do business with you. They may even turn down a better offer from someone else - something the late majority rarely does.
Get enough people on the left side of the curve on your side and they encourage the rest to follow.
Energy excites. Charisma inspires.
Charisma has nothing to do with energy; it comes from a clarity of WHY. It comes from absolute conviction in an ideal bigger than oneself. Energy, in contrast, comes from a good night's sleep or lots of caffeine. Energy can excite. But only charisma can inspire. Charisma commands loyalty. Energy does not.
Golden Circle matches an organization
Sitting at the top of the system, representing the WHY, is a leader; in the case of a company, that's usually the CEO. The next level down, the HOW level, typically includes the senior executives who are inspired by the leader's vision and know HOW to bring it to life. Don't forget that a WHY is just a belief, HOWs are the actions we take to realize that belief and WHATs are the results of those actions. No matter how charismatic or inspiring the leader is, if there are not people in the organization inspired to bring that vision to reality, to build an infrastructure with systems and processes, then at best, inefficiency reigns, and at worst, failure results.
WHY-types are focused on the things most people can't see, like the future. HOW-types are focused on things most people can see and tend to be better at building structures and processes and getting things done.
Most people in the world are HOW-types. Most people are quite functional in the real world and can do their jobs and do very well. Some may be very successful and even make millions of dollars, but they will never build billion-dollar businesses or change the world. HOW-types don't need WHY-types to do well. Buy WHY-guys, for all their vision and imagination, often get the short end of the stick. Without someone inspired by their vision and the knowledge to make it a reality, most WHY-types end up as starving visionaries, people with all the answers but never accomplishing much themselves.
When a company is small, it revolves around the personality of the founder. There is no debate that the founder's personality is the personality of the company. As a company grows, the CEO's job is to personify the WHY. To ooze of it. To talk about it. To preach it. To be a symbol of what the company believes.
We all know when a company's WHY goes fuzzy. Split can happen.
For Wal-Mart, WHAT they do and HOW they are doing it hasn't changed. And it has nothing to do with Wal-Mart being a 'corporation'; they were one of those before the love started to decline. What has changed is that their WHY went fuzzy. And we all know it. A company once so loved is simply not as loved anymore. The negative feelings we have for the company are real, but the part of the brain that is able to explain why we feel so negatively toward them has trouble explaining what changed. So we rationalize and point to the most tangible things we can see - size and money. If we, as outsiders, have lost clarity of Wal-Mart's WHY, it's a good sign that the WHY has gone fuzzy inside the company also. If it's not clear on the inside, it will never be clear on the outside. What is clear is that the Wal-Mart of today is not the Wal-Mart that Sam Walton built.
It's too easy to say that all they care about is their bottom line. All companies are in business to make money, but being successful at it is not the reason why things change so drastically. That only points to a symptom. Without understanding the reason it happened in the first place, the pattern will repeat for every other company that makes it big. It is not destiny or some mystical business cycle that transforms successful companies into impersonal Goliaths. It's people.
For most of us, somewhere in the journey, we forget WHY we set out on the journey in the first place. Somewhere in the course of all those achievements, an inevitable split happens.
Those with an ability to never lose sight of WHY, no matter how little or how much they achieve, can inspire us. Those with the ability to never lose sight of WHY and also achieve the milestones that keep everyone focused in the right direction are the great leaders.
As this metric grows, any company can become a 'leading' company. But it is the ability to inspire, to maintain clarity of WHY, that gives only a few people and organizations the ability to lead. The moment at which the clarity of WHY starts to go fuzzy is the split. At this point, organizations may be loud, but they are no longer clear.
The challenge isn't to cling to the leader, it's to find effective ways to keep the founding vision alive forever.
For an organization to continue to inspire and lead beyond the lifetime of its founder, the founder's WHY. must be extracted and integrated into the culture of the company. What's more, a strong succession plan should aim to find next generation. Future leaders and employees alike must be inspired by something bigger than the force of personality of the founder and must see beyond profit and shareholder value alone.
The WHY originates from looking back
Before it can gain any power or achieve any impact, an arrow must be pulled backward, 180 degrees away from the target. And that's also where a WHY derives its power. The WHY does not come from looking ahead at what you want to achieve and figuring out an appropriate strategy to get there. It is not born out of any market research. It does not come from extensive interviews with customers or even employees. It comes from looking in the completely opposite direction from where you are now. Finding WHY is a process of discovery, not invention.