Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork

by Dan Sullivan

Rather than sitting by yourself, trying to perfect the idea without feedback, it’s far more effective to throw your ideas out there fast, get feedback from your team, and then adjust as you go.

The faster you get at throwing out incomplete work, the faster it will transform into something great. Dan calls this the 80 percent rule. You can get to 80 percent of a project very quickly, such as writing a rough draft. However, going from 80 percent to 90 percent is exponentially more work than going from 0 to 80 percent. Going from 90 to 100 percent is a mountain. You just need to do what you can do as the Who, and then quickly pass it off to the next Who. The longer you try to perfect your idea before feedback, the slower the transformation process. Get your Whos involved. Stop trying to do it all yourself. The sooner you get teamwork involved, the faster and better your work will be. Also, with encouragement, you’ll work through challenges instead of procrastinating as you would naturally.

get used to “publishing” or sending out imperfect work. Nothing is ever truly “finished,” only “done....

as a leader, you should want nothing more than to be a hero for your team.

By adding Whos to what you’re doing, with greater capabilities and perspectives where you’re weak, the initial vision you had will automatically expand. Your goal becomes far better than anything you could conjure up on your own.

The antidote to being isolated in your goals is asking: “Who can help me accomplish this?”

“The only way to be remembered fondly is to increase others’ capabilities.”

The traditional education system supported the industrial model, wherein students were not taught to collaborate, lead, and do teamwork, but instead were taught to generalize in a bunch of Hows and take meaningless and abstract tests. This system fosters a sense of competition, wherein a person’s self-worth is based on how they individually do on a test or assignment against other individuals.

Henry David Thoreau famously stated in Walden that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” We believe that the main reason people do this is because they’ve been taught to think individualistically, rather than collaboratively.