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

by Simon Sinek

Regardless of HOW or WHAT was being done, there was one thing everyone had in common—WHY they were doing it.

as the ideal platform for Dr. King to bring his WHY, his belief in equality, to life.

People heard his beliefs and his words touched them deep inside. Those who believed what he believed took that cause and made it their own. And they told people what they believed. And those people told others what they believed. Some organized to get that belief out more efficiently.

And that speech was about what he believed, not how they were going to do it.

It was a statement of purpose and not a comprehensive twelve-point plan to achieving civil rights in America. Dr. King offered America a place to go, not a plan to follow. The plan had its place, but not on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

This was a belief not about black America, this was a belief about a shared America.

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.

More than anything else, what Martin Luther King Jr. gave us was clarity, a way to explain how we felt. He gave us the words that inspired us. He gave us something to believe in, something we could easily share with our friends.

Energy Excites. Charisma Inspires.

It wasn’t just WHAT computers did that Gates saw the impact for the new technology, it was WHY we needed them.

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.

Loyalty among employees is when they turn down more money or benefits to continue working at the same company. Loyalty to a company trumps pay and benefits. And unless you’re an astronaut, it’s not the work we do that inspires us either. 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.

My cause—to inspire people to do the things that inspire them—is WHY I get out of bed every day. The excitement is trying to find new ways, different WHATs to bring my cause to life, of which this book is one.

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.

to actually move people requires organizing.

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. A route without a destination, however, may be efficient, but to what end? It’s all fine and good to know how to drive, but it’s more fulfilling when you have a place to go. For Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy was one of those he inspired and who knew HOW to make the cause actionable and tangible. “Dr. King’s job was to interpret the ideology and theology of non-violence,” said Abernathy. “My job was more simple and down-to-earth. I would tell [people], ‘Don’t ride those buses.’”

In every case of a great charismatic leader who ever achieved anything of significance, there was always a person or small group lurking in the shadows who knew HOW to take the vision and make it a reality. Dr. King had a dream. But no matter how inspiring a dream may be, a dream that cannot come to life stays a dream.

The vision and charisma of the leader are enough to attract the innovators and the early adopters. Trusting their guts and their intuition, these people will make the greatest sacrifices to help see the vision become a reality. With each success, with every tangible demonstration that the vision can in fact become reality, the more practical-minded majority starts to take interest. What was previously just a dream soon becomes a provable and tangible reality. And when that happens, a tipping point can be reached and then things really get moving.

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

WHY-types are the visionaries, the ones with the overactive imaginations. They tend to be optimists who believe that all the things they imagine can actually be accomplished. HOW-types live more in the here and now. They are the realists and have a clearer sense of all things practical. 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. One is not better than the other, they are just different ways people naturally see and experience the world. Gates is a WHY-type. So were the Wright brothers. And Steve Jobs. And Herb Kelleher. But they didn’t do it alone. They couldn’t. They needed those who knew HOW.

Roy helped turn Walt Disney’s dreams into reality, building the company that bears his brother’s name.”

And, like almost every HOW-type, Roy never wanted to be the front man; he preferred to stay in the background and focus on HOW to build his brother’s vision.

Most people in the world are HOW-types.

This relationship starts to clarify the difference between a vision statement and a mission statement in an organization. The vision is the public statement of the founder’s intent, WHY the company exists. It is literally the vision of a future that does not yet exist. The mission statement is a description of the route, the guiding principles—HOW the company intends to create that future. When both of those things are stated clearly, the WHY-type and the HOW-type are both certain about their roles in the partnership. Both are working together with clarity of purpose and a plan to get there. For it to work, however, it requires more than a set of skills, it requires trust.

Great organizations not only excite the human spirit, they inspire people to take part in helping to advance the cause without needing to pay them or incentivize them in any particular way. No cash-back incentives or mail-in rebates required. People feel compelled to spread the word, not because they have to, but because they want to. They willingly take up arms to share the message that inspires them.

The problem was, it wasn’t clear. It was all WHATs and HOW and no WHY. Even though people learned what the product did, no one knew what BCI believed.

King’s message would still have reached thousands of people. But his belief would not have been clear.

For a message to have real impact, to affect behavior and seed loyalty, it needs more than publicity. It needs to publicize some higher purpose, cause or belief to which those with similar values and beliefs can relate. Only then can the message create any lasting mass-market success.

In fact, it is one of the defining factors that makes an organization great. Great organizations don’t just drive profits, they lead people, and they change the course of industries and sometimes our lives in the process.

A clear sense of WHY sets expectations. When we don’t know an organization’s WHY, we don’t know what to expect, so we expect the minimum—price, quality, service, features—the commodity stuff. But when we do have a sense for the WHY, we expect more. For those not comfortable being held to a higher standard, I strongly advise against trying to learn your WHY or keeping your Golden Circle in balance. Higher standards are hard to maintain. It requires the discipline to constantly talk about and remind everyone WHY the organization exists in the first place. It requires that everyone in the organization be held accountable to HOW you do things—to your values and guiding principles. And it takes time and effort to ensure that everything you say and do is consistent with your WHY. But for those willing to put in the effort, there are some great advantages.

He sees a world in which people accept the lives they live and do the things they do not because they have to, but because no one ever showed them an alternative.

It doesn’t matter WHAT Ron Bruder does. The industries and the challenges are incidental. What never changes is WHY he does things.

Bruder realized the problems we face with terrorism in the West have less to do with what young boys and girls in the Middle East think about America and more to do with what they think about themselves and their own vision of the future.

KNOW WHY. KNOW HOW. THEN WHAT?

If people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it, and if all the things happening at the WHAT level do not clearly represent WHY the company exists, then the ability to inspire is severely complicated.

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. They are the intention and WHAT the company says and does is their voice. Like Martin Luther King and his social movement, the leader’s job is no longer to close all the deals; it is to inspire.

Just as the cone demonstrates, the CEO’s job, the leader’s responsibility, is not to focus on the outside market—it’s to focus on the layer directly beneath: HOW. The leader must ensure that there are people on the team who believe what they believe and know HOW to build it. The HOW-types are responsible for understanding WHY and must come to work every day to develop the systems and hire the people who are ultimately responsible for bringing the WHY to life. The general employees are responsible for demonstrating the WHY to the outside world in whatever the company says and does. The challenge is that they are able to do it clearly.

Remember the biology of The Golden Circle. The WHY exists in the part of the brain that controls feelings and decision-making but not language.

WHATs exist in the part of the brain that controls rational t...

Just as it is hard for people to speak their feelings, like someone trying to explain why they love their spouse, it is equally hard for an organization to explain its WHY. The part of the brain that controls feelings and the part that controls language are not the same.

Put bluntly, the struggle that so many companies have to differentiate or communicate their true value to the outside world is not a business problem, it’s a biology problem.

COMMUNICATION IS NOT ABOUT SPEAKING, IT’S ABOUT LISTENING

And the only reason symbols have meaning is because we infuse them with meaning. That meaning lives in our minds, not in the item itself. Only when the purpose, cause or belief is clear can a symbol command great power.

Most companies have logos, but few have been able to convert those logos into meaningful symbols. Because most companies are bad at communicating what they believe, so it follows that most logos are devoid of any meaning.

It’s not just logos, however, that can serve as symbols. Symbols are any tangible representation of a clear set of values and beliefs.

Put simply, best practices are not always best.

It is not just WHAT or HOW you do things that matters; what matters more is that WHAT and HOW you do things is consistent with your WHY.

What you do is supposed to serve as the tangible proof of what you believe, and you bought everything.

Filtering your decisions through your WHY, you spend less time at the supermarket and you spend less money, so there’s an efficiency advantage also. You’re guaranteed to get value out of all the products you bought. And, most importantly, when you’re standing in line with your products in your arms, everybody can see what you believe.

In this case, VW has a clear WHY, but WHAT they produced was completely misaligned. They failed the Celery Test.