Start With Why (9 page)

Absent a WHY, a decision is harder to make. And when in doubt we look to science, to data, to guide decisions. Companies will tell you that the reason they start with WHAT they do or HOW they do it is because that’s what their customers asked for. Quality. Service. Price. Features. That’s what the data reported. But for the fact that the part of the brain that controls decision-making is different from the part of the brain that is able to report back that decision, it would be a perfectly valid conclusion to give people what they ask for. Unfortunately, there is more evidence that sales don’t significantly increase and bonds of loyalty are not formed simply when companies say or do everything their customers want. Henry Ford summed it up best. “If I had asked people what they wanted,” he said, “they would have said a faster horse.”

This is the genius of great leadership. Great leaders and great organizations are good at seeing what most of us can’t see. They are good at giving us things we would never think of asking for. When the computer revolution was afoot, computer users couldn’t ask for a graphical user interface. But that’s what Apple gave us. In the face of expanding competition in the airline industry, most air travelers would never have thought to ask for less instead of more. But that’s what Southwest did. And in the face of hard times and overwhelming odds, few would have asked their country, what can I do for you over what can you do for me? The very cause upon which John F. Kennedy introduced his presidency. Great leaders are those who trust their gut. They are those who understand the art before the science. They win hearts before minds. They are the ones who start with WHY.

We make decisions all day long, and many of them are emotionally driven. Rarely do we sift through all the available information to ensure we know every fact. And we don’t need to. It is all about degrees of certainty. “I can make a decision with 30 percent of the information,” said former secretary of state Colin Powell. “Anything more than 80 percent is too much.” There is always a level at which we trust ourselves or those around us to guide us, and don’t always
feel
we need all the facts and figures. And sometimes we just may not trust ourselves to make a certain decision yet. This may explain why we
feel
(there’s that word again) so uncomfortable when others twist our arm to make a decision that doesn’t sit well in our gut. We trust our gut to help us decide whom to vote for or which shampoo to buy. Because our biology complicates our ability to verbalize the real reasons why we make the decisions we do, we rationalize based on more tangible factors, like the design or the service or the brand. This is the basis for the false assumption that price or features matter more than they do. Those things matter, they provide us the tangible things we can point to to rationalize our decision-making, but they don’t set the course and they don’t inspire behavior.

“Gets your whites whiter and your brights brighter,” said the TV commercial for the newest laundry detergent. This was the value proposition for so many years in the laundry detergent business. A perfectly legitimate claim. That’s what the market research revealed customers wanted. The data was true, but the truth of what people wanted was different.

The makers of laundry detergent asked consumers WHAT they wanted from detergent, and consumers said whiter whites and brighter brights. Not such a remarkable finding, if you think about it, that people doing laundry wanted their detergent to help get their clothes not just clean, but very clean. So brands attempted to differentiate HOW they got your whites whiter and brights brighter by trying to convince consumers that one additive was more effective than another. Protein, said one brand. Color enhancers, said another. No one asked customers WHY they wanted their clothes clean. That little nugget wasn’t revealed until many years later when a group of anthropologists hired by one of the packaged-goods companies revealed that all those additives weren’t in fact driving behavior. They observed that when people took their washing out of the dryer, no one held it up to the light to see how white it was or compared it to newer items to see how bright it was. The first thing people did when they pulled their laundry out of the dryer was to smell it. This was an amazing discovery.
Feeling
clean was more important to people than being clean. There was a presumption that all detergents get your clothes clean. That’s what detergent is supposed to do. But having their clothes smell fresh and clean mattered much more than the nuanced differences between which detergent actually made clothes measurably cleaner.

That a false assumption swayed an entire industry to follow the wrong direction is not unique to detergents. Cell phone companies believed people wanted more options and buttons until Apple introduced its iPhone with fewer options and only one button. The German automakers believed their engineering alone mattered to American car buyers. They were stunned and perplexed when they learned that great engineering wasn’t enough. One by one, the German luxury car makers begrudgingly added cup holders to their fine automobiles. It was a feature that mattered a great deal to commuter-minded Americans, but was rarely mentioned in any research about what factors influenced purchase decisions. I am not, for a moment, proposing that cup holders make people loyal to BMWs. All I am proposing is that even for rationally minded car buyers, there is more to decision-making than meets the eye. Literally.

The power of the limbic brain is astounding. It not only controls our gut decisions, but it can influence us to do things that seem illogical or irrational. Leaving the safety of home to explore faraway places. Crossing oceans to see what’s on the other side. Leaving a stable job to start a business out of your basement with no money in the bank. Many of us look at these decisions and say, “That’s stupid, you’re crazy. You could lose everything. You could get yourself killed. What are you thinking?” It is not logic or facts but our hopes and dreams, our hearts and our guts, that drive us to try new things.

If we were all rational, there would be no small businesses, there would be no exploration, there would be very little innovation and there would be no great leaders to inspire all those things. It is the undying belief in something bigger and better that drives that kind of behavior. But it can also control behavior born out of other emotions, like hate or fear. Why else would someone plot to hurt someone they had never met?

The amount of market research that reveals that people want to do business with the company that offers them the best-quality products, with the most features, the best service and all at a good price is astounding. But consider the companies with the greatest loyalty—they rarely have all those things. If you wanted to buy a custom Harley-Davidson, you used to wait six months for delivery (to give them credit, they’ve got it down from a year). That’s bad service! Apple’s computers are at least 25 percent more expensive than a comparable PC. There is less software available for their operating system. They have fewer peripherals. The machines themselves are sometimes slower than a comparable PC. If people made only rational decisions, and did all the research before making a purchase, no one would ever buy a Mac. But of course people do buy Macs. And some don’t just buy them—they love them, a feeling that comes straight from the heart. Or the limbic brain.

We all know someone who is a die-hard Mac lover. Ask them WHY they love their Mac. They won’t tell you, “Well, I see myself as someone who likes to challenge the status quo, and it’s important for me to surround myself with the people, products and brands that prove to the outside world who I believe I am.” Biologically, that’s what happened. But that decision was made in the part of the brain that controls behavior but not language. So they will provide a rationalization: “It’s the user interface. It’s the simplicity. It’s the design. It’s the high quality. They’re the best computers. I’m a creative person.” In reality, their purchase decision and their loyalty are deeply personal. They don’t really care about Apple; it’s all about them.

The same can even be said for the people who love to work at Apple. Even employees can’t put it into words. In their case, their job is one of the WHATs to their WHY. They too are convinced it’s the quality of the products alone that is behind Apple’s success. But deep inside, they all love being a part of something bigger than themselves. The most loyal Apple employees, like the most loyal Apple customers, all love a good revolution. A great raise and added benefits couldn’t convince a loyal Apple employee to work for Dell, and no amount of cash-back incentives and rebates could convince a loyal Mac user to switch to a PC (many are already paying double the price). This is beyond rational. This is a belief. It’s no accident that the culture at Apple is often described as a cult. It’s more than just products, it’s a cause to support. It’s a matter of faith.

Remember the Honda and the Ferrari? Products are not just symbols of what the company believes, they also serve as symbols of what the loyal buyers believe. People with Apple laptop computers, for example, love opening them up while sitting in an airport. They like that everyone knows they are using a Mac. It’s an emblem, a symbol of who they are. That glowing Apple logo speaks to something about them and how they see the world. Does anyone notice when someone pops open the lid of their HP or Dell computer? No! Not even the people using the computers care. HP and Dell have a fuzzy sense of WHY, so their products and their brands don’t symbolize anything about the users. To the Dell or HP user, their computer, no matter how fast or sleek, is not a symbol of a higher purpose, cause or belief. It’s just a computer. In fact, for the longest time, the logo on the lid of a Dell computer faced the user so when they opened it, it would be upside down for everyone else.

Products with a clear sense of WHY give people a way to tell the outside world who they are and what they believe. Remember, people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. If a company does not have a clear sense of WHY then it is impossible for the outside world to perceive anything more than WHAT the company does. And when that happens, manipulations that rely on pushing price, features, service or quality become the primary currency of differentiation.

Nature abhors a vacuum. In order to promote life, Mother Nature attempts to find balance whenever possible. When life is destroyed because of a forest fire, for example, nature will introduce new life to replace it. The existence of a food chain in any ecosystem, in which each animal exists as food for another, is a way of maintaining balance. The Golden Circle, grounded in natural principles of biology, obeys the need for balance as well. As I’ve discussed, when the WHY is absent, imbalance is produced and manipulations thrive. And when manipulations thrive, uncertainty increases for buyers, instability increases for sellers and stress increases for all.

Starting with WHY is just the beginning. There is still work to be done before a person or an organization earns the right or ability to inspire. For The Golden Circle to work, each of the pieces must be in balance and in the right order.

It all starts with clarity. You have to know WHY you do WHAT you do. If people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it, so it follows that if you don’t know WHY you do WHAT you do, how will anyone else? If the leader of the organization can’t clearly articulate WHY the organization exists in terms beyond its products or services, then how does he expect the employees to know WHY to come to work? If a politician can’t articulate WHY she seeks public office beyond the standard “to serve the people” (the minimum rational standard for all politicians), then how will the voters know whom to follow? Manipulations can motivate the outcome of an election, but they don’t help choose who should lead. To lead requires those who willingly follow. It requires those who believe in something bigger than a single issue. To inspire starts with the clarity of WHY.

Once you know WHY you do what you do, the question is HOW will you do it? HOWs are your values or principles that guide HOW to bring your cause to life. HOW we do things manifests in the systems and processes within an organization and the culture. Understanding HOW you do things and, more importantly, having the discipline to hold the organization and all its employees accountable to those guiding principles enhances an organization’s ability to work to its natural strengths. Understanding HOW gives greater ability, for example, to hire people or find partners who will naturally thrive when working with you.

Ironically, the most important question with the most elusive answer—WHY do you do what you do?—is actually quite simple and efficient to discover (and I’ll share it in later chapters). It’s the discipline to never veer from your cause, to hold yourself accountable to HOW you do things; that’s the hardest part. Making it even more difficult for ourselves, we remind ourselves of our values by writing them on the wall . . . as nouns. Integrity. Honesty. Innovation. Communication, for example. But nouns are not actionable. They are things. You can’t build systems or develop incentives around those things. It’s nearly impossible to hold people accountable to nouns. “A little more innovation today if you would please, Bob.” And if you have to write “honesty” on your wall to remind you to do it, then you probably have bigger problems anyway.

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea . . . we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation. We can hold each other accountable to them measure them or even build incentives around them. Telling people to have integrity doesn’t guarantee that their decisions will always keep customers’ or clients’ best interest in mind; telling them to always do the right thing does. I wonder what values Samsung had written on the wall when they developed that rebate that wasn’t applicable to people living in apartment buildings.