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

by Simon Sinek

Knowing your WHY is not the only way to be successful, but it is the only way to maintain a lasting success and have a greater blend of innovation and flexibility.

When a WHY goes fuzzy, it becomes much more difficult to maintain the growth, loyalty and inspiration that helped drive the original success.

What if they had defined themselves as being in the mass transportation business? Perhaps their behavior would have been different. Perhaps they would have seen opportunities that they otherwise missed. Perhaps they would own all the airlines today.

Perhaps if music companies had a clearer sense of WHY, they would have seen the opportunity to invent the equivalent of iTunes instead of leaving it to a scrappy computer company.

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.

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.

Those products and brands make us feel like we belong and we feel a kinship with others who buy the same things.

U2 and Apple belong together because they share the same values and beliefs. They both push boundaries.

The power of WHY is not opinion, it’s biology.

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 that controls decision-making, and our language part of the brain allows us to rationalize those decisions.

It is how our loved ones make us feel, but those feelings are really hard to put into words.

Decision-making and the ability to explain those decisions exist in different parts of the brain. This is where “gut decisions” come from. They just feel right. There is no part of the stomach that controls decision-making, it all happens in the limbic brain. It’s not an accident that we use that word “feel” to explain those decisions either. The reason gut decisions feel right is because the part of the brain that controls them also controls our feelings. Whether you defer to your gut or you’re simply following your heart, no matter which part of the body you think is driving the decision, the reality is it’s all in your limbic 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. This is one of the primary reasons why teachers tell students to go with their first instinct when taking a multiple-choice test, to trust their gut. The more time spent thinking about the answer, the bigger the risk that it may be the wrong one. 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.

Companies that fail to communicate a sense of WHY force us to make decisions with only empirical evidence. This is why those decisions take more time, feel difficult or leave us uncertain. Under these conditions manipulative strategies that exploit our desires, fears, doubts or fantasies work very well. We’re forced to make these less-than-inspiring decisions for one simple reason—companies don’t offer us anything else besides the facts and figures, features and benefits upon which to base our decisions. Companies don’t tell us WHY.

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.

This is what we mean when we talk about winning hearts and minds. The heart represents the limbic, feeling part of the brain, and the mind is the rational, language center.

Absent a WHY, a decision is harder to make. And when in doubt we look to science, to data, to guide decisions.

Henry Ford summed it up best. “If I had asked people what they wanted,” he said, “they would have said a faster horse.”

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.

It is all about degrees of certainty.

This may explain why we feel (there’s that word again) so uncomfortable when others twist our arm to make a decision that doesn’t sit well in our gut. We trust our gut to help us decide whom to vote for or which shampoo to buy.

No one asked customers WHY they wanted their clothes clean.

Feeling clean was more important to people than being clean.

But having their clothes smell fresh and clean mattered much more than the nuanced differences between which detergent actually made clothes measurably cleaner.

Cell phone companies believed people wanted more options and buttons until Apple introduced its iPhone with fewer options and only one button.

The German automakers believed their engineering alone mattered to American car buyers. They were stunned and perplexed when they learned that great engineering wasn’t enough. One by one, the German luxury car makers begrudgingly added cup holders to their fine automobiles. It was a feature that mattered a great deal to commuter-minded Americans, but was rarely mentioned in any research about what factors influenced purchase decisions.

All I am proposing is that even for rationally minded car buyers, there is more to decision-making t...

The power of the limbic brain is astounding. It not only controls our gut decisions, but it can influence us to do things...

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.

But deep inside, they all love being a part of something bigger than themselves.

This is beyond rational. This is a belief. It’s no accident that the culture at Apple is often described as a cult. It’s more than just products, it’s a cause to support. It’s a matter of faith.

Remember the Honda and the Ferrari? Products are not just symbols of what the company believes, they also serve as symbols of what the loyal buyers believe.

HP and Dell have a fuzzy sense of WHY, so their products and their brands don’t symbolize anything about the users. To the Dell or HP user, their computer, no matter how fast or sleek, is not a symbol of a higher purpose, cause or belief. It’s just a computer. In fact, for the longest time, the logo on the lid of a Dell computer faced the user so when they opened it, it would be upside down for everyone else.

Products with a clear sense of WHY give people a way to tell the outside world who they are and what they believe.

Remember, people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. If a company does not have a clear sense of WHY then it is impossible for the outside world to perce...

As I’ve discussed, when the WHY is absent, imbalance is produced and manipulations thrive. And when manipulations thrive, uncertainty increases for buyers, instability increases for sellers and stress increases for all.

It all starts with clarity. You have to know WHY you do WHAT you do. If people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it, so it follows that if you don’t know WHY you do WHAT you do, how will anyone else? If the leader of the organization can’t clearly articulate WHY the organization exists in terms beyond its products or services, then how does he expect the employees to know WHY to come to work?

To inspire starts with the clarity of WHY.

Once you know WHY you do what you do, the question is HOW will you do it? HOWs are your values or principles that guide HOW to bring your cause to life. HOW we do things manifests in the systems and processes within an organization and the culture. Understanding HOW you do things and, more importantly, having the discipline to hold the organization and all its employees accountable to those guiding principles enhances an organization’s ability to work to its natural strengths. Understanding HOW gives greater ability, for example, to hire people or find partners who will naturally thrive when working with you.

But nouns are not actionable.

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea . . . we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation. We can hold each other accountable to measure them or even build incentives around them.

Everything you say and everything you do has to prove what you believe. A WHY is just a belief. That’s all it is. HOWs are the actions you take to realize that belief. And WHATs are the results of those actions—everything you say and do: your products, services, marketing, PR, culture and whom you hire. If people don’t buy WHAT you do but WHY you do it, then all these things must be consistent. With consistency people will see and hear, without a shadow of a doubt, what you believe. After all, we live in a tangible world. 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.

It is at the WHAT level that authenticity happens.

They go out and do customer research and they ask the customers, what would we have to tell you for us to be authentic? This entirely misses the point. You can’t ask others what you have to do to be authentic.

It means that everything you say and everything you do you actually believe.

Authenticity cannot be achieved without clarity of WHY. And authenticity matters.

What does belief have to do with a sales job? Simple. 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.

Authenticity is when you say and do the things you actually believe.