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by
Simon Sinek
Great leaders, in contrast, are able to inspire people to act. Those who are able to inspire give people a sense of purpose or belonging that has little to do with any external incentive or benefit to be gained. Those who truly lead are able to create a following of people who act not because they are swayed but because they are inspired.
Those who are inspired are often willing to pay a premium, put up with inconvenience and sometimes even endure personal suffering. For those who are inspired, the motivation to act is deeply personal.
Novelty is a quick fix because it’s easy to produce. Real innovation, in contrast, is special, different and rare. When something is actually innovative, the choice is obvious.
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.
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.
The Golden Circle provides compelling evidence of how much more we can achieve if we remind ourselves to start everything we do by first asking why.
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.
when we communicate from the inside out, we talk directly to the part of the brain that regulates our behavior, the limbic system, and once we have made our decisions, the language part of the brain allows us to rationalize those decisions.
Asking people why they chose you over another may provide wonderful evidence of how they have rationalized the decision, but it does not shed much light on the true motivation for the decision.
Decision-making and the ability to explain those decisions exist in different parts of the brain.
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.
Great leaders trust their gut more often. They are those who understand the art before the science. They win hearts before minds.
They are the ones who understand that the best decisions are emotional. And emotions are usually hard to verbalize.
When belief enters the equation, passion exudes. 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. Without a balanced Golden Circle, there is no authenticity, which means no strong relationships, which means no trust.
It is a false assumption that differentiation happens in HOW and WHAT you do. Simply offering a high-quality product with more features or better service or a better price does not create difference. Doing so guarantees no success. Differentiation happens in WHY and HOW you do it.
When WHY, HOW and WHAT are in balance, authenticity is achieved and we feel fulfilled. When they are out of balance, stress or uncertainty exists. And when that happens, the decisions we make will also be out of balance. Without WHY, we are more easily motivated by aspiration or fear.
Trust is a feeling, not a rational experience.
Value, by definition, is the transference of trust.
When we share values and beliefs with others, we form trust.
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.
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. “The
The lack of a clear set of values and beliefs, along with the weak culture that resulted, created the conditions for an every-man-for-himself environment, the long-term impact of which could yield little else than disaster. This is caveman stuff.
If companies do not actively work to keep their Golden Circle in balance—clarity, discipline and consistency—then trust starts to break down.
Passion is not an input, it’s an output.
Charisma comes from a clarity of WHY, from absolute conviction in an ideal bigger than oneself.
While we might get excited about WHAT we’re doing, we are inspired by WHY we’re doing it. We don’t want to come to work to lay bricks, we want to come to work to build a cathedral.
WHY is just a belief, HOWs are the actions we take to realize that belief and WHATs are the results of those actions.
The vision is the public statement of the intent, the cause the company exists to advance. 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.
Communicate clearly and you shall be understood.
Achievement is something you reach or attain, like a goal. It is something tangible, clearly defined and measurable. Success, in contrast, is a feeling or a state of being.
A WHY without the HOWs, passion without
structure, has a very high probability of failure.
Money is never a cause, it is always a result.
The WHY does not come from looking ahead at what you want to achieve and figuring out an appropriate strategy to get there. It is not born out of any market research. It does not come from extensive interviews with customers or even employees. It comes from looking in the complete opposite direction from where you are now. Finding WHY is a process of discovery, not invention.
