Start with WHY

This document is prepared by Wilco Sinnema, based on the book of Simon Sinek.

www.startwithwhy.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

1.  Assume You Know 2.  Carrots and Sticks 3.  The Golden Circle

4.  This Is Not Opinion, This Is Biology

5.  Clarity, Discipline and Consistency

6.  The Emergence of Trust 7.  How a Tipping Point Tips 8.  Start with WHY, but Know

HOW 9.  Know WHY. Know HOW. Then

WHAT? 10.  Communication Is Not About

Speaking, It’s About Listening 11.  When WHY Goes Fuzzy 12.  Split Happens 13.  The Origins of a WHY 14.  The New Competition

-  Assumptions -  Manipulation -  People don’t buy what you do,

they buy WHY you do it -  Brain: Decision-making vs

Language -  WHY, HOW and WHAT

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1. Assume You Know

•  We make decisions based on what we know •  Our behavior is affected by our assumptions or

our perceived truths

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2. Carrots and Sticks

•  Manipulation vs Inspiration •  Manipulations:

– Price – Promotions – Fear – Aspirations – Peer pressure – Novelty (a.k.a. Innovation)

•  Trade-off: Transactions ≠ Loyalty

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3. The Golden Circle

People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.

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3. The Golden Circle

•  Purpose •  Cause •  Belief

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4. This Is Biology

•  This Is Not Opinion, This Is Biology

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•  Limbic brain is responsible for feelings – trust loyalty, etc. –  Behavior –  Decision-making

•  Neocortex is responsible for rational and analytic thought and language

4. This Is Biology

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4. This Is Biology

•  Companies that fail to communicate a sense of WHY force us to make decisions with only empirical evidence – facts

•  When a decision feels right, we have a hard time explaining it – we rationalize

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5. Clarity, Discipline and Consistency

•  Clarity = WHY •  Discipline = HOW •  Consistency = WHAT – authenticity

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5. Clarity, Discipline and Consistency

•  HOWs are values or principles that guide HOW to bring your cause (=WHY) to life – Systems – Processes – Culture

•  WHATs: everything you say and do: products, services, marketing, PR, culture, and who you hire

•  WHAT should be a tangible proof of the WHY

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5. Clarity, Discipline and Consistency

•  WHY is a belief •  HOWs are the actions you take to realize that

belief •  WHATs are the results of those actions

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6. Emergence of Trust

•  Feeling •  Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense

that another person / organization is driven by things other than their own self-gain

•  With trust comes a sense of value •  Those who lead are able to do so because those

who follow trust that the decisions made at the top have the best interest of the group at heart

•  Trust allows us to rely on others

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6. Emergence of Trust

•  Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them

•  Average companies give their people something to work on; innovative organizations give their people something to work toward

•  Companies with a clear sense of WHY tend to ignore competition, whereas those with a fuzzy sense of WHY are obsessed with what others are doing

•  Great organizations become great because the people inside the organization feel protected

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6. Emergence of Trust

•  Only when individuals can trust the culture or organization they will take personal risks in order to advance that culture or organization as a whole

•  For those within a community, or an organization, they must trust that their leaders provide a net – practical or emotional; with that feeling of support, those in the organization are more likely to put in extra effort that ultimately benefits the group as a whole

•  People come to work knowing that their bosses, colleagues and the organization as a whole will look out for them; this results in reciprocal behavior

•  Passion comes from feeling like you are a part of something that you believe in, something bigger than yourself

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7. How a Tipping Point Tips

•  The Law of Diffusion of Innovations – explains the spread of ideas

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7. How a Tipping Point Tips

•  Innovators and early adopters rely heavily on their intuition – they trust their gut

•  The early and late majority are more practical-minded – for them, rational factors matter more

•  The farther right you go on the curve, the more you will encounter the clients and customers who may need what you have, but don’t necessarily believe what you believe

•  The ability to get the system to tip is the point at which the growth of a business or spreading of an idea start to move at an extra-ordinary pace

•  (…) The importance of identifying this group is so that you can avoid doing business with them

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7. How a Tipping Point Tips

•  The goal of business should not be to simply sell to anyone who wants what you have – the majority – but rather to find people who believe what you believe (the left side of the bell curve); they are the ones who (…) will tell others about you – who share your beliefs and want to incorporate your ideas, your products and your services into their lives (as WHATs to their own WHYs)

•  Get enough of the people on the left side of the curve on your side and they encourage the rest to follow

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8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW

•  Charisma (…) comes from a clarity of WHY; it comes from absolute conviction in an ideal bigger than oneself

•  All the things (…) charismatic leaders did were tangible ways they found to bring their WHYs to life – none of them could have imagined WHAT they would be doing when they were young

•  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

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8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW

The HOW level represents a person or a small group responsible for building the infrastructure that can make a WHY tangible

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8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW

•  For every great leader, for every WHY-type, there is an inspired HOW-type or group of HOW-types who take the intangible cause and build the infrastructure that can give it life

•  The leader imagines the destination and the HOW-types find the route to get there

•  HOW-types know HOW to make the cause actionable and tangible

•  HOW-types live more in the here and now – they are the realists and have a clear sense of all things practical

•  WHY-types are focused on the things most people can’t see; HOW-types are focused on things people can see and tend to be better at building structures and processes and gtd

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8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW

It is the partnership of a vision of the future and the talent to get it done that makes and organization great: •  This relationship starts to clarify the difference between

a vision statement and a mission statement •  The vision is the public statement of the founder’s

intent, WHY the company exists – it is literally the future that does not exist yet

•  The mission statement is a description of the route, the guiding principles – HOW the company intends to create that future

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8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW

•  Build a megaphone that works •  Clarity of purpose, cause of belief is important,

but it equally important that people hear you; for a WHY to have the power to move people it must not only be clear, it must be amplified to reach enough people to tip the scale

•  Say it only if you believe it; a clear sense of WHY sets expectations – it requires the everyone in the organization be held accountable to HOW you do things

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9. Know WHY. Know HOW. The WHAT?

•  Organization – Hierarchical – Organized

•  Marketplace – Nonhierarchical –  Inherently chaotic and disorganized

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9. Know WHY. Know HOW. The WHAT?

The only contact that the organized system has with the disorganized system is at the WHAT level •  Everything an organization says and does

communicates the leader’s vision to the outside world •  All the products and services that a company sells, all

the marketing and advertising, all the contact with the world outside communicate this

•  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 severly complicated

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9. Know WHY. Know HOW. The WHAT?

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

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10. Communication Is Not About Speaking, It’s About Listening

•  The Cellery Test: –  M&M’s, rice milk, Oreo cookies and/or cellery –  What if your WHY is to do only things that are healty? To

always do the things that are good for your body? •  It is not just WHAT and HOW you do things that

matters; what matters more is that WHAT and HOW you do things is consistent with your WHY

•  With a WHY clearly stated in an organization, anyone within the organization can make a decision as clearly and as accurately as the founder; a WHY provides the clear filter for decision-making

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11. When WHY Goes Fuzzy

•  Being successful vs feeling succesful •  Achievement vs success:

– Achievement is something you reach or attain, like a goal – something tangible, clearly defined and measurable

– Success is a feeling or a state of being – Achievement comes when you pursue and attain

WHAT you want – Success comes when you are clear in pursuit of

WHY you want it

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12. Split Happens

•  At the beginning, ideas are fueled by passion – that very compelling emotion that causes us to do quite irrational things

•  But most of us, unfortunately, reach a place where WHAT we are doing and WHY we are doing it eventually fall out of balance; it is the separation of the tangible and the intangible that marks the split

•  The challenge (isn’t to cling to the leader) is to find effective ways to keep the founding vision alive forever

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12. Split Happens

•  The School Bus Test: If a founder or leader of an organization were to be hit by a school bus, would the organization continue to thrive at the same pace without them at the helm

•  To pass the School Bus Test, for an organization to continue to inspire and lead beyond the lifetime of its founder, the founder’s WHY must be extracted and integrated into the culture of the company

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12. Split Happens

•  When people can point to a company and clearly articulate what the company believes and use words unrelated to price, quality, service and features, that is proof the company has successfully navigated the split

•  When people describe the value the perceive with visceral, excited words like “love”, that is a sure sign that a clear sense of WHY exists

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12. Split Happens

•  Good successions keep the WHY alive •  When the person who personifies the WHY

departs without clearly articulating WHY the company was founded in the first place, they leave no clear cause for their successor to lead

•  Great second or third CEOs don’t take the helm to implement their own vision of the future; they pick up the original banner and lead the company into the next generation – that’s why it’s called succession, not replacement

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13. The Origins of WHY

•  The WHY comes from looking back •  Finding WHY is process of discovery (not

invention) •  Gaining clarity of WHY (ironically) is not the

hard part; it is the discipline to trust one’s guts, to stay to one’s purpose, cause or beliefs; remaining completely in balance and authentic is the most difficult part

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14. The New Competition

•  If you follow your WHY, then others will follow you

•  We’re always competing against someone else •  We’re always comparing ourselves to others •  What if we showed up to work every day

simply to be better than ourselves?

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14. The New Competition

-  “Who’s you competition?” “No idea.” -  “Well, what makes you better than your competition?” “We’re not better than them in all cases.” -  “Well, why should I do business with you then?” “Because the work we’re doing now is better than the work we were doing six months ago. And the work we’ll be doing six months from now will be better than the work we’re doing today. Because we wake up every day with a sense of WHY we come to work. We come to inspire people to do things that inspire them. Are we better than our competition? If you believe what we believe and you believe that the things we do can help you, than we’re better. If you don’t believe what we believe and you don’t believe the things we can do will help you, them we’re not better.

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14. The New Competition

Our goal is to find customers who believe what we believe and work together so that we can all succeed. We’re looking for people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us in pursuit of the same goal. We’re not interested in sitting across a table from each other in pursuit of a sweeter deal. And here are the things we’re doing to advance our cause…”

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