Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

by Simon Sinek

Whether individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead not because we have to, but because we want to. We follow those who lead not for them, but for ourselves.

There’s barely a product or service on the market today that customers can’t buy from someone else for about the same price, about the same quality, about the same level of service and about the same features.

But if you ask most businesses why their customers are their customers, most will tell you it’s because of superior quality, features, price or service. In other words, most companies have no clue why their customers are their customers. This is a fascinating realization.

If companies don’t know why their customers are their customers, odds are good that they don’t know why their employees are their employees either.

The reality is, most businesses today are making decisions based on a set of incomplete or, worse, completely flawed assumptions about what’s driving their business.

From business to politics, manipulations run rampant in all forms of sales and marketing. Typical manipulations include: dropping the price; running a promotion; using fear, peer pressure or aspirational messages; and promising innovation to influence behavior—be it a purchase, a vote or support.

Drop your prices low enough and people will buy from you.

Once buyers get used to paying a lower-than-average price for a product or service, it is very hard to get them to pay more. And the sellers, facing overwhelming pressure to push prices lower and lower in order to compete, find their margins cut slimmer and slimmer. This only drives a need to sell more to compensate. And the quickest way to do that is price again. And so the downward spiral of price addiction sets in.

Promotions

For a long time the promotions worked brilliantly. GM’s sales were on the rise again.

Realizing that the model was unsustainable, GM announced it would reduce the amount of the cash-back incentives it offered, and with that reduction, sales plummeted. No cash, no customers.

Whether it is “two for one” or “free toy inside,” promotions are such common manipulations that we often forget that we’re being manipulated in the first place.

Next time you’re in the market for a digital camera, for example, pay attention to how you make your decision. You’ll easily find two or three cameras with the specifications you need—size, number of megapixels, comparable price, good brand name. But perhaps one has a promotion—a free carrying case or free memory card. Given the relative parity of the features and benefits, that little something extra is sometimes all it takes to tip the scale. In the business-to-business world, promotions are called “value added.” But the principles are the same—give something away for free to reduce the risk so that someone will do business with you. And like price, promotions work.

The manipulative nature of promotions is so well established in retail that the industry even named one of the principles. They call it breakage. Breakage measures the percentage of customers who fail to take advantage of a promotion and end up paying full price for a product instead. This typically happens when buyers don’t bother performing the necessary steps to claim their rebates, a process purposely kept com...

Rebates typically require the customer to send in a copy of a receipt, cut out a bar code from the packaging and painstakingly fill out a rebate form with details about the product and how it was purchased. Sending in the wrong part of the box or leaving out a detail on the application can delay the rebate for weeks, months, or void it altogether. The rebate industry also has a name for the number of customers who just ...

Fear If someone were to hold up a bank with a banana in his pocket, he would be charged with armed robbery. Clearly, no victim was in any danger of being shot, but it is the belief that the robber has a real gun that is considered by the law. And for good reason. Knowing full well that fear will motivate them to comply with his demands, the robber took steps to make his victims afraid. Fear, real or perceived, is arguably the most powerful manipulation of the lot.

If anyone has ever sold you anything with a warning to fear the consequences if you don’t buy it, they are using a proverbial gun to your head to help you see the “value” of choosing them over their competitor. Or perhaps it’s just a banana. But it works.

Aspirations

Marketers often talk about the importance of being aspirational, offering someone something they desire to achieve and the ability to get there more easily with a particular product or service.

Peer Pressure

“Four out of five dentists prefer Trident,”

“With over a million satisfied customers and counting,” teases another ad. These are all forms of peer pressure.

Novelty (a.k.a. Innovation)

“In a major innovation in design and engineering, [Motorola] has created a phone of firsts,”

“The combination of metals, such as aircraft-grade aluminum, with new advances, such as an internal antenna and a chemically-etched keypad, led to the formation of a device that measures just 13.9mm thin.” And it worked. Millions of people rushed to get one. Celebrities flashed their RAZRs on the red carpet.

This was truly an innovation of monumental proportions. Or was it? Less than four years later, Zander was forced out. The stock traded at 50 percent of its average value since the launch of the RAZR, and Motorola’s competitors had easily surpassed the RAZR’s features and functionalities with equally innovative new phones. Motorola was once again rendered just another mobile phone manufacturer fighting for its piece of the pie. Like so many before it, the company confused innovation with novelty.

The Price You Pay for the Money You Make I cannot dispute that manipulations work. Every one of them can indeed help influence behavior and every one of them can help a company become quite successful. But there are trade-offs. Not a single one of them breeds loyalty. Over the course of time, they cost more and more. The gains are only short-term. And they increase the level of stress for both the buyer and the seller.

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.

Just Because It Works Doesn’t Make It Right The danger of manipulations is that they work. And because manipulations work, they have become the norm, practiced by the vast majority of companies and organizations, regardless of size or industry. That fact alone creates a systemic peer pressure. With perfect irony, we, the manipulators, have been manipulated by our own system. With every price drop, promotion, fear-based or aspirational message, and novelty we use to achieve our goals, we find our companies, our organizations and our systems getting weaker and weaker.

The Golden Circle

WHAT: Every single company and organization on the planet knows WHAT they do.

HOW: Some companies and people know HOW they do WHAT they do. Whether you call them a “differentiating value proposition,” “proprietary process” or “unique selling proposition,” HOWs are often given to explain how something is different or better.

WHY: Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. When I say WHY, I don’t mean to make money—that’s a result. By WHY I mean what is your purpose, cause or belief? WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care?

When most organizations or people think, act or communicate they do so from the outside in, from WHAT to WHY. And for good reason—they go from clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. We say WHAT we do, we sometimes say HOW we do it, but we rarely say WHY we do WHAT we do. But not the inspired companies. Not the inspired leaders. Every single one of them, regardless of their size or their industry, thinks, acts and communicates from the inside out.

It’s worth repeating: people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.

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.

Apple, unlike its competitors, has defined itself by WHY it does things, not WHAT it does. It is not a computer company, but a company that challenges the status quo and offers individuals simpler alternatives. Apple even changed its legal name in 2007 from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple Inc. to reflect the fact that they were more than just a computer company.

The Sneetches perfectly capture a very basic human need—the need to belong.

Our need to belong is not rational, but it is a constant that exists across all people in all cultures. It is a feeling we get when those around us share our values and beliefs. When we feel like we belong we feel connected and we feel safe. As humans we crave the feeling and we seek it out.

Sometimes our feeling of belonging is incidental. We’re not friends with everyone from our hometown, but travel across the state, and you may meet someone from your hometown...

No matter where we go, we trust those with whom we are able to perceive common values or beliefs.

Our desire to feel like we belong is so powerful that we will go to great lengths, do irrational things and often spend money to get that feeling.

When companies talk about WHAT they do and how advanced their products are, they may have appeal, but they do not necessarily represent something to which we want to belong.

But when a company clearly communicates their WHY, what they believe, and we believe what they believe, then we will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to include those products or brands in our lives. This is not because they are better, but because they become markers or symbols of the values and beliefs we hold dear. Those products and brands make us feel like we belong and we feel a kinship with others who buy the same things. Fan clubs, started by customers, are often formed without any help from the company itself. These people form communities, in person or online, not just to share their love of a product with others, but to be in the company of people like them. Their decisions have nothing to do with the company or its products; they have everything to do with the individuals themselves.

Our natural need to belong also makes us good at spotting things that don’t belong. It’s a sense we get. A feeling. Something deep inside us, something we can’t put into words, allows us to feel...

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.

The power of WHY is not opinion, it’s biology. If you look at a cross section of the human brain, from the top down, you see that the levels of The Golden Circle correspond precisely with the three major levels of the brain. 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.