Start With Why: This Is Not Opinion, This Is Biology (Chapter 4 Summary)

This book summary series is taken from Simon Sinek’s Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2011). Your curiosity and knowledge are infinite, but your time is not. Read this summary – and you’ll be inspired!

“The power of WHY is not opinion, it’s biology”
(Simon Sinek)

Sinek pointed that “our need to belong is not rational, but it is a constant that exists across all people in all cultures.” It is a feeling we get when those around us share our values and beliefs. When we feel like we belong we feel connected and we feel safe. As humans we crave the feeling and we seek it out. No matter where we go, we trust those with whom we are able to perceive common values or beliefs. In the same way, we want to be around people and companies who are like us and share our beliefs. “When a company clearly communicates their WHY and we believe what they believe, then we will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to include those products or brands in our lives.” This is not because they are better, but because markers or symbols of the values and beliefs we hold dear. Simon believes that we are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe.  

Part of communicating what leaders value and believe is in how they make decisions. When good leaders thought that a certain decision feels right, they have a hard time explaining why they did what they did. Decision-making and the ability to explain those decisions exist in different parts of the brain. This is the famous gut decision, and it happens in the limbic brain. The reason gut decisions feel right is because the limbic brain also controls our feelings. This limbic brain is smart and often knows the right thing to do. It is our inability to verbalize the reasons that may cause us to doubt ourselves or trust the empirical evidence when our gut tells us not to.

Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” This is the genius of great leadership. Great leaders and organizations are good at seeing what most of us can’t see. They are good at giving us things we should never think of asking for. In summary, Sinek writes, “Great leaders are those who trust their guts. They are those who understand the art before science, they win hearts before minds. They are the ones who start with WHY.” Products with a clear sense of WHY give people a way to tell the outside world who they are and what they believe (think of Apple Inc. and their loyal customers). 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 price, features, service or quality became the primary currency of differentiation.

The Power of WHY is Not Opinion, It’s Biology

Start With Why: The Golden Circle (Chapter 3 Summary)

This book summary series is taken from Simon Sinek’s Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2011). Your curiosity and knowledge is infinite, but your time is not. Read this summary – and you’ll be inspired!

The Golden Circle finds order and predictability in human behaviour. Put simply, it helps us understand why we do what we do.

WHAT: What do you do? [“Every organization on the planet knows WHAT they do. These are products they sell or services they offer.”]

HOW: How do you do what you do? [“Some organization know HOW they do It. these are the things that make them special or set them apart from their competitors.”]

WHY: Why do you do what you do? What’s the purpose? [“Very few organization know WHY they do it. WHY is not about making money. That’s a result. WHY is a purpose, cause or belief. It’s the very reason your organization exists.”]

Simon Sinek explains that most companies communicate on WHAT they do; from the outside to the inside of the golden circle. They know exactly what product or service they offer and what features it has. Some organizations might even know HOW they do it. This might be the Unique Selling Proposition (USP). But very few know WHY they do what they do. “The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.”

By starting with why and communicating from the inside out, organizations can inspire people to take action. For example, Apple Inc. company:

Apple if they were like everyone else:

We make great computers.
They are beautiful designed, simple to use and user-friendly.
Want to buy one?

How Apple actually communicate:

Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly. And we happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?

Apple simply doesn’t reverse the order of information, their message starts with WHY, a purpose, cause or belief that has nothing to do with WHAT they do. What they do – the products that they make, from computers to small electronics – no longer serves as the reason to buy, they serve as the tangible proof of their cause. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

Most organizations, however, use the tangible features and benefits to build a rational argument for why their company, product or idea is better than another. Companies try to sell us WHAT they do, but we buy WHY they do it. When communicating from the inside and out, the WHY is offered as the reason to buy and the WHAT serve as the tangible proof of that belief. Consumers and investors are completely at ease with Apple offering so many different products in so many categories. It’s not WHAT Apple does that distinguishes them. It is WHY they do it. Their products give life to their cause and everything they do works to demonstrate their WHY.

Apples competitors lost their cause, they turned from companies with a cause into a company that sold products. And when that happens, price, quality, service and features become the primary currency to motivate a purchase decision. At that point a company and its products have become commodities. Simon assured that a company doesn’t have to have to best product, they just need to be good or very good. Better or best is a relative comparison. Sinek argued, “Without first understanding of WHY, the comparison itself is of no value on the decision maker.”

If a customer feels inspired rather than manipulated to buy a product, they will be able to verbalize the reasons why they think what they bought is better. It is the cause that is represented by the company, brand, product or person that inspires loyalty (see previous article). So, instead of asking “WHAT should we do to compete?” the question must be asked is, “WHY did we start doing WHAT we’re doing in the first place, and WHAT can we do to bring our cause to life considering all the technologies and market opportunities available today?”

From Inside Out: Ask WHY, then How, then WHAT. Always Start with WHY.

Start With Why: Carrots and Sticks (Chapter 2 Summary)

This book summary series is taken from Simon Sinek’s Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2011). Your curiosity and knowledge is infinite, but your time is not. Read this summary – and you’ll be inspired!

Simon Sinek tells that there are only two ways to influence human behaviour: You can manipulate them or you can inspire them. Inspiration (see Introduction) is always better than manipulation. When companies do not have a clear sense of why their customers are their customers, they tend to rely on a disproportionate number of manipulations to get what they need. Here are typical ways of manipulations, Carrots and Sticks:

Price. For the seller, selling based on price is like heroin. The short-term gain is fantastic, but the more you do it, the harder it becomes to kick the habit. Once buyers get used to paying a lower-than-average price for a product or service, it is very hard to get them to pay more.

Fear. Fear – real or perceived – is arguably the most powerful manipulation and also very destructive.

Peer Pressure. When marketers report that a majority of a population or a group of experts prefers their product over another, they are attempting to sway the buyer to believing that whatever they are selling is better. Peer pressure works not because the majority or the experts are always right, but because “we fear that we may be wrong.”

Novelty. Real innovation changes the course of industries or even societies, like the light bulb, the microwave and iTunes. Adding a camera to a mobile phone is not an innovation – a great feature, but not industry altering. Novelty can drive sales but the impact does not last. “If a company adds too many novel ideas too often, it can have a similar impact on the product or category as the price game. In an attempt to differentiate with more features, the product start to look and feel more like commodities and, like price, the need to add yet another product to the line of compensate for the commodization ends in a downward spiral.”

Manipulations Lead to Transactions,
Only Inspirations Lead to Loyalty.

Manipulations don’t breed loyalty, although they can drive sales. Over time, they cost more and more. And they increase the stress for both buyer and seller. Loyalty is when people are willing to turn down a better product or better price to continue doing business with you. Loyal customers often don’t even bother to research the competition.

Addicted to the short term results, businesses today has largely become a series of quick fixes added on one after another. “Carrots and sticks work just fine for transactions occurring on the average just once, but if you want to build lasting relationships, you have to inspire people.” Manipulations are perfectly valid strategy for driving a transaction. But if you want loyalty, inspired people. It is the feeling of “we’re in this together” shared between customer and company, employers and employee, mentor and mentees that defines great leaders.

Start With Why: Assume You Know (Chapter 1 Summary)

This book summary series is taken from Simon Sinek’s Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2011). Your curiosity and knowledge is infinite, but your time is not. Read this summary – and you’ll be inspired!

“This is important because our behavior is affected by our assumptions or our perceived truths. We make decisions based on what we think we know”
(Simon Sinek)

Simon Sinek explained that we make assumptions about the world around us based on sometimes incomplete or false information – we make decision based on what we think we know. Do we really know why some organizations succeed and why others don’t or do we just assume? If things don’t go as expected, it’s probably because we’ve missed one. More data, however, doesn’t always help. There are other factors that must be considered, factors that exist outside our rational, analytical, information-hungry brains.

The author gives an example from the Japanese Automaker. An American executive went to see a Japanese car assembly line. At the end of the time, the doors were put on the hinges, the same as in the America. But one step was missing in Japan. In America, workers would take rubber mallets and tap the edges of the door to ensure that it fit perfectly. The Japanese, however, didn’t examine the problem and accumulate date to figure out the best solution – they engineered the outcome they wanted from the beginning. If they didn’t achieve their desired outcome, they understood it was because of a decision they made at the start of the process. What the American automakers did with their rubber mallets is a metaphor for how many people and organizations lead.

The Japanese said, “We make sure it fits when we design it.” There are those who decide to manipulate the door to fit to achieve the desired result and there are those who start from somewhere very different. Though both courses of action may yield similar short-term results, it is what we can’t see that makes long-term success more predictable for only one. The one that understood why the doors need to fit by design and not by default.

Our Assumption is Important

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Introduction Summary)

This book summary series is taken from Simon Sinek’s Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2011). Your curiosity and knowledge is infinite, but your time is not. Read this summary – and you’ll be inspired!

“There are only two ways to influence human behavior:
you can manipulate it or you can inspire it” (Simon Sinek)

The ability to motivate people is, in itself, not difficult. It is usually tied to some external factor. Great leaders, in contrast, writes Sinek, are able to inspire people to act. Those who are able to inspire give people a sense of purpose or belonging that has little to do with any external incentive or benefit to be gained. Those who truly lead are able to create a following of people who act not because they were swayed, but because they were inspired.

For those who are inspired, the motivation to act is deeply personal. They are less likely to be swayed by incentives. Those who are inspired are willing to pay a premium or endure inconvenience, even personal suffering. Those who are able to inspire will create a following of people – supporters, voters, customers, workers – who acts for the good of the whole not because they have to, but because they want to.

People who love going to work are more productive and creative. They go home happier and have happier families. They treat their colleagues and clients and customers better. Inspired employees make for stronger companies and stronger economies.

Great Leaders, inspired!