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

by Simon Sinek

All the inspiring leaders and companies, regardless of size or industry, think, act and communicate exactly alike.

Peer pressure works not because the majority or the experts are always right, but because we fear that we may be wrong.

Like so many before it, the company confused innovation with novelty.

Real innovation changes the course of industries or even society.

They are added in an attempt to differentiate, but not reinvent.

Novelty can drive sales—the RAZR proved it—but the impact does not last. If

Peter Whybrow, in his book American Mania: When More Is Not Enough, argues that many of the ills that we suffer from today have very little to do with the bad food we’re eating or the partially hydrogenated oils in our diet. Rather, Whybrow says, it’s the way that corporate America has developed that has increased our stress to levels so high we’re literally making ourselves sick because of it. Americans are suffering ulcers, depression, high blood pressure, anxiety, and cancer at record levels. According to Whybrow, all those promises of more, more, more are actually overloading the reward circuits of our brain. The short-term gains that drive business in America today are

There’s no trickery, no manipulation, no free stuff, no aspirational messages, no celebrities.

“WHY did we start doing WHAT we’re doing in the first place, and WHAT can we do to bring our cause to life considering all the technologies and market opportunities available today?”

Ironically, the most important question with the most elusive answer—WHY do you do what you do?—is actually quite simple and efficient to discover (and I’ll share it in later chapters). It’s the discipline to never veer from your cause, to hold yourself accountable to HOW you do things; that’s the hardest part.

The only way people will know what you believe is by the things you say and do, and if you’re not consistent in the things you say and do, no one will know what you believe.

The goal of business should not be to do business with anyone who simply wants what you have. It should be to focus on the people who believe what you believe. When we are selective about doing business only with those who believe in our WHY, trust emerges.

Bethune knew that building a team to go out and win meant more than giving a few rah-rah speeches and bonuses for the top brass if they hit certain revenue targets.

“We measured things the employees could truly control,”

Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them.

Inspired by the founder’s vision, many early employees demonstrate classic early-adopter behavior. Relying on their gut, these first employees also quit their perfectly good jobs and accept lower salaries to join an organization with a 90 percent statistical chance of failing. But the statistics don’t matter; passion and optimism reign and energy is high. Like all early adopters, the behavior of those who join early says more about them than it does about the company’s prospects.

The reason so many small businesses fail, however, is because passion alone can’t cut it. For passion to survive, it needs structure. A WHY without the HOWs, passion without structure, has a very high probability of failure.

But having spent so many years focused on converting a vision into a viable business, many started to fixate on WHAT the organization did or HOW to do it. Poring over financials or some other easily measured result, and fixating on HOW they were to achieve those tangible results, they stopped focusing on WHY they started the business in the first place.

For a company, that measurement is usually money—profits, revenues, EBITA, share price or growth in market share. But the metric can be anything, depending on what the organization does. If the organization rescues lost puppies, then the metric would be the number of puppies successfully rescued. It is inherently simple to measure the growth of WHAT an organization does. WHATs, after all, are tangible and easy to count.

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.

It is no accident that big companies talk about a “return to basics.”

Most organizations today use very clear metrics to track the progress and growth of WHAT they do—usually it’s money. Unfortunately, we have very poor measurements to ensure that a WHY stays clear.

Money is a perfectly legitimate measurement of goods sold or services rendered. But it is no calculation of value. Just because somebody makes a lot of money does not mean that he necessarily provides a lot of value. Likewise, just because somebody makes a little money does not necessarily mean he provides only a little value.