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

by Simon Sinek

There is a big difference between repeat business and loyalty. Repeat business is when people do business with you multiple times. Loyalty is when people are willing to turn down a better product or a better price to continue doing business with you.

For transactions that occur an average of once, carrots and sticks are the best way to elicit the desired behavior. When the police offer a reward they are not looking to nurture a relationship with the witness or tipster; it is just a single transaction.

Knowing you have a loyal customer and employee base not only reduces costs, it provides massive peace of mind. Like loyal friends, you know your customers and employees will be there for you when you need them most. It is the feeling of “we’re in this together,” shared between customer and company, voter and candidate, boss and employee, that defines great leaders.

All the advertising, promotions and pressure employed to tempt us one way or another, each attempting to push harder than the other to court us for our money or our support, ultimately yields one consistent result: stress.

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?

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

For Apple, however, having the word “Computer” in their name didn’t limit WHAT they could do. It limited how they thought of themselves. The change wasn’t practical, it was philosophical.

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.

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

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.

Our limbic brain is powerful, powerful enough to drive behavior that sometimes contradicts our rational and analytical understanding of a situation.

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.

Manipulation and inspiration both tickle the limbic brain. Aspirational messages, fear or peer pressure all push us to decide one way or another by appealing to our irrational desires or playing on our fears. But it’s when that emotional feeling goes deeper than insecurity or uncertainty or dreams that the emotional reaction aligns with how we view ourselves.

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.

Mud rolls down a hill, and if you’re the one standing at the bottom, you get hit with the full brunt.

But all that didn’t last long once Bethune arrived. The very next year Continental made $250 million and was soon ranked as one of the best companies to work for in America. And while Bethune made significant changes to improve the operations, the greatest gains were in a performance category that is nearly impossible to measure: trust.

Trust is a feeling, not a rational experience.

With trust comes a sense of value—real value, not just value equated with money. Value, by definition, is the transference of trust. You can’t convince someone you have value, just as you can’t convince someone to trust you.

Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you—not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to.

In turn, those who trust work hard because they feel like they are working for something bigger than themselves.

Howard understood from a very young age the very human desire to win. No one likes to lose, and most healthy people live their life to win. The only variation is the score we use. For some it’s money, for others it’s fame or awards. For some it’s power, love, a family or spiritual fulfillment.

The drive to win is not, per se, a bad thing. Problems arise, however, when the metric becomes the only measure of success, when what you achieve is no longer tied to WHY you set out to achieve it in the first place.

We’ve succeeded as a species because of our ability to form cultures. Cultures are groups of people who come together around a common set of values and beliefs. When we share values and beliefs with others, we form trust.

There Shackleton left behind all but five of his men and embarked on a hazardous journey across 800 miles of rough seas to find help. Which, eventually, they did. What makes the story of the Endurance so remarkable, however, is not the expedition, it’s that throughout the whole ordeal no one died. There were no stories of people eating others and no mutiny.

“You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.”

Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left.

Although already well regarded in his own field, he craved the kind of fame of a Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, the kind that comes only with inventing something big. Langley saw the airplane as his ticket to fame and fortune. He was smart and motivated. He had what we still assume is the recipe for success: plenty of cash, the best people and ideal market conditions. But few of us have ever heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley.

The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen.

Southwest Airlines is famous for pioneering the ten-minute turnaround—the ability to deplane, prep, and board a plane in ten minutes. This ability helps an airline make more money, because the more the planes are in the sky, the better the company is doing. What few people realize is that this innovation was born out of struggle. In 1971, Southwest was running low on cash and needed to sell one of their aircraft to stay in business. This left them with three planes to fly a schedule that required four. They had two choices: they could scale back their operations, or they could figure out how to turn their planes around in ten minutes. And thus was born the ten-minute turnaround.

Great organizations become great because the people inside the organization feel protected. The strong sense of culture creates a sense of belonging and acts like a net. People come to work knowing that their bosses, colleagues and the organization as a whole will look out for them.

Southwest Airlines, a company renowned for its customer focus, does not, as a matter of policy, believe the customer is always right. Southwest will not tolerate customers who abuse their staff. They would rather those customers fly on a different airline.

I use the military because it exaggerates the point. Trust matters. Trust comes from being a part of a culture or organization with a common set of values and beliefs. Trust is maintained when the values and beliefs are actively managed. If companies do not actively work to keep their Golden Circle in balance—clarity, discipline and consistency—then trust starts to break down. A company, indeed any organization, must work actively to remind everyone WHY the company exists. WHY it was founded in the first place. What it believes. They need to hold everyone in the company accountable to the values and guiding principles. It’s not enough to just write them on the wall—that’s passive.

Without managed trust, people will show up to do their jobs and they will worry primarily about themselves. This is the root of office politics—people acting within the system for self-gain often at the expense of others, even the company. If a company doesn’t manage trust, then those working for it will not trust the company, and self-interest becomes the overwhelming motivation. This may be good for the short term, but over time the organization will get weaker and weaker.

So many decisions (and indeed contract negotiations) are based on an advertising industry measurement called a Q-score—a quotient of how well recognized a celebrity is, how famous they are, so to speak. The higher the score, the better the unaided awareness of the celebrity.

If you don’t know the law, you’re likely already familiar with some of its terminology. Our population is broken into five segments that fall across a bell curve: innovators, early adoptors, early majority, late majority and laggards.

According to the Law of Diffusion, mass-market success can only be achieved after you penetrate between 15 percent to 18 percent of the market.

The ability to get the system to tip is the point at which the growth of a business or the spreading of an idea starts to move at an extraordinary pace. It is also at this point that a product gains mass-market acceptance. The point at which an idea becomes a movement. When that happens, the growth is not only exponential, it is automatic. It just goes.

It wasn’t the details of his plans that earned him the right to lead. It was what he believed and his ability to communicate it clearly that people followed.

Energy motivates but charisma inspires. Energy is easy to see, easy to measure and easy to copy. Charisma is hard to define, near impossible to measure and too elusive to copy.

It’s not Bill Gates’s passion for computers that inspires us, it’s his undying optimism that even the most complicated problems can be solved. He believes we can find ways to remove obstacles to ensure that everyone can live and work to their greatest potential. It is his optimism to which we are drawn.

It’s the cause we come to work for. We don’t want to come to work to build a wall, we want to come to work to build a cathedral.

The leader sits at the top of the cone—at the start, the point of WHY—while the HOW-types sit below and are responsible for actually making things happen. The leader imagines the destination and the HOW-types find the route to get there. A destination without a route leads to meandering and inefficiency, something a great many WHY-types will experience without the help of others to ground them.

The pessimists are usually right, to paraphrase Thomas Friedman, author of The World Is Flat, but it’s the optimists who change the world.

Like all WHY guys, Walt was busy thinking about what the future looked like and often forget he was living in the present. “Walt Disney dreamed, drew and imagined, Roy stayed in the shadow, forming an empire,” wrote Bob Thomas, a Disney biographer.

HOW-types don’t need WHY-types to do well. But 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.

A business is a structure—systems and processes that need to be assembled.

To reach the billion-dollar status, to alter the course of an industry, requires a very special and rare partnership between one who knows WHY and those who know HOW.

It’s not an accident that these unions of WHY and HOW so often come from families or old friendships.

A shared upbringing and life experience increases the probability of a shared set of values and beliefs. In the case of family or childhood friends, upbringing and common experiences are nearly exactly the same. That’s not to say you can’t find a good partner somewhere else.

A perfect opportunity, he thought, to teach the young girls a valuable life lesson. He pointed across the street to the red glow of the “Do Not Walk” signal and asked them what they thought that sign meant. “It means we have to stand here,” they replied. “Are you sure?” he asked rhetorically. “How do you know it’s not telling us to run?”