Start With Why covers everything you need to know about creating an organization that puts its values at the center of its business. The core concept is simple and straightforward: great businesses know why they’re doing what they’re doing—and they use that mission as their guiding principle.
Given this goal, Start With Why covers three aspects of WHY: 1) defining your WHY, 2) understanding how your WHY affects your company on all levels, and 3) making sure you stay focused on your WHY in the long-term.
Your WHY is your central belief. It’s the concept that motivates you to get out of bed in the morning. In terms of an organization, it’s the reason you’re in business.
The WHY leads to the HOW and the WHAT:
As an example, we’ll use technology company Apple:
These three elements form The Golden Circle. The Golden Circle looks like a target, where the WHY is the bullseye, the HOW is the middle ring, and the WHAT is the exterior ring. When you start with WHY, you build your company’s message from the inside out. As a result, customers want to engage with your product because they believe in it. They become loyal to you and your company, which builds your brand and spreads your message.
Unfortunately, most companies don’t start with WHY. That’s because starting with WHY is hard. It involves a lot of introspection, inspiration, vision, and clarity.
Instead, most companies start with WHAT. As the most superficial layer, it’s the easiest to identify and communicate.
As a thought experiment, consider Tom, a man going on a date. When he sits down, he starts with his WHAT: “I’m a really successful person. I own a BMW and my best friends are all CEOs or models. I’m rich and I can buy you lots of nice things.”
Obviously, Tom sounds obnoxious, the kind of person who wouldn’t get a second date. Surprisingly, companies communicate exactly like this: “Our product has the best features. Our customers are the biggest companies in the world. We’re making a lot of money, and you should buy our product too.”
But customers don’t buy WHAT - they buy the WHY. Think about Tom starting with WHY: “What gets me out of bed every morning is making an impact on people by solving their problems. It’s the best feeling in the world. I’m also super lucky to get career success doing what I love. I’ve gotten to know lots of interesting people and I’m fortunate to be able to buy nice things.”
Because starting with WHY is hard, most companies turn to manipulations to sell a product. Manipulations are tactics that artificially influence customers to buy from your company or use its services. They include Price, Promotion, Fear, Aspiration, Peer Pressure, and Novelty.
Manipulations work, but they’re only short-term solutions. They won’t create loyal, repeat customers. Only inspiration can do that.
Inspiration happens when a company shares its WHY. At that point, the company isn’t selling a product—it’s selling an idea. As a result, the company’s communications are authentic: the company believes in its message, which comes across to customers. Those customers who share the same WHY are attracted to the company, and when the product is good, it establishes trust. That, in turn, brings in more customers, and creates a repeatable cycle of success.
Notable companies that focus on using their WHY to inspire include Apple, Southwest Airlines, and Harley Davidson.
Great leaders create strong company cultures where everyone works toward the same goal. They inspire employees to believe and pursue WHY instead of WHAT.
An inspired team shows many benefits, including:
Building an organization that’s based on trust starts with the hiring process. When you have a strong WHY, you can find employees who are also passionate about your mission.
The trick to building a tribe based on inspiration is to look beyond a résumé. Don’t just hire skilled people that you then have to motivate. Instead, hire motivated people who believe in your WHY, and inspire them.
To figure out your WHY, take a step back and examine your motivation behind what you do. It’s more than just making a profit (or at least, it should be). It’s the big, bold vision that motivates your company. Once you have your WHY, you can start focusing on sharing it effectively with the world.
The Golden Circle isn’t really flat like a normal bulls-eye target. Instead, it’s a three-dimensional cone.
In order to have a strong WHY, every ring of the company needs to be aligned with the organization’s guiding vision. The leaders in the WHY ring need to share the WHY clearly with those in the HOW ring. The HOWs then make sure the WHATs are able to share the organization’s message with everyone else. This creates The Golden Circle Megaphone, which amplifies your message in a way that inspires everyone it touches.
You also have to be able to use your WHY as a filter for making good decisions. That’s where The Celery Test comes in.
Let’s say you’re at a dinner party, and everyone is giving you advice, telling you to buy products like Oreos, celery, and M&Ms. The advice-givers are successful, smart, trustworthy people that want you to buy things that will help you succeed. But if you go out and buy everything they tell you to, you’ll a) waste money and b) purchase products that might not be a good fit for your company. .
But when you have a strong WHY, you can make decisions based on that idea. If your WHY is to be healthy and eat wholesome food, you know that buying Oreos and M&Ms isn’t right for you. But celery is aligned with your mission, so you should get that instead.
In essence, the Celery Test acts as a filter to whittle down all the possible options into only the few that support your WHY.
Ultimately, The Celery Test does three things for a company:
The Celery Test works with The Golden Circle Megaphone to give companies the means to put WHY at the center of both their messaging and business decisions.
Creating a WHY for a company or organization requires a visionary, inspirational leader. Think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Sam Walton. These leaders are the ones providing the passion and motivation for the business, especially when its first starting out.
But one of the central problems with starting with WHY is that it leads to success. As a business grows, that inspirational leader becomes further and further removed from the daily aspects of the company’s WHAT. When that happens, a company can lose sight of its WHY.
When a successful company transforms from a WHY organization to a WHAT organization, it’s called “the split.” This happens when the leadership of a company starts focusing too much on measurable metrics, like financial growth. Suddenly, the organization is focusing on its WHAT, not its WHY. And when that happens, companies stagnate. Examples of companies that have gone through the split include Microsoft, AOL, and Walmart.
But the split doesn’t have to happen. Here are strategies for keeping the focus on WHY: