Chapter 9: Communicating With the Marketplace

Now that you’re thinking of The Golden Circle as a three-dimensional cone, it’s time to talk about what that cone is sitting on: the marketplace.

The marketplace is made up of all the customers, shareholders, competition, supplies, money, and all the other factors that make an economy work. The marketplace is characterized by chaos and disorganization. While your organization has structure and purpose, the world outside it doesn’t.

Getting your message out and into that chaotic space is tough, especially since the only contact your organization has with the marketplace is at the bottom of the cone at the WHAT level. If your WHAT doesn’t embody and communicate your WHY, the marketplace won’t hear it.

For small businesses, this isn’t a huge problem. That’s because the company’s CEO--the head of WHY--is intimately involved in the company’s WHAT, too.

But as a company grows, and there are more HOW and WHAT level employees, the WHY leaders become farther removed from the marketplace. The WHY leaders have less capacity to communicate directly with customers, and become more involved with managing the HOW.

Put another way, as a company grows, the WHY leadership becomes the limbic brain of the company, unable to use language to express its WHY to the marketplace. That purpose is left to the WHAT level, which creates the products, the marketing campaigns, and the customer support functions.

The key, then, is to communicate your WHY clearly throughout every level of the organization. In doing so, you’ll be able to articulate your WHY to the marketplace, too.