Start with Why

Manipulation or inspiration

Simon Sinek, a former advertising executive, opens with three puzzles. Why did Apple, a computer maker with no special technical edge, keep producing products people lined up for? Why did the Wright brothers, two bicycle makers with no funding, beat Samuel Pierpont Langley, who had government money, a Smithsonian post and the best minds of the day, to the first powered flight? And why did a quarter of a million people travel to Washington in August 1963 to hear Martin Luther King Jr. when nobody sent invitations? His answer is that all three started with why.

Before he explains, he describes what most companies do instead. They know what they sell and roughly how they sell it, and they move people with manipulations. Sinek lists them: price cuts, promotions, fear ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), aspirations (every January gym offer), peer pressure ("four out of five dentists") and novelty (a phone with one new feature). Manipulations work. They produce a transaction every time. They do not produce loyalty, and each one costs more than the last. Car companies learned this with rebates: once buyers expected them, nobody bought without one. Sinek argues that there are only two ways to influence behavior, manipulation and inspiration, and that most companies have forgotten the second exists.

The Golden Circle

The book's framework is three concentric rings. The outer ring is what: the products a company sells or the job a person does. Every organization knows its what. The middle ring is how: the process, the values or the differentiating steps. Some know this. The center is why: the purpose, cause or belief that explains why the organization exists and why anyone should care. Very few organizations can state it. Making money is not a why. It is a result.

Most companies communicate from the outside in. "We make great computers. They are beautifully designed and easy to use. Want to buy one?" Sinek argues that Apple communicates from the inside out. "Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo and thinking differently. The way we do that is by making beautifully designed products. We happen to make great computers." The order changes the message from a pitch to a cause. It is also why Apple could sell music players and phones without confusing anyone, while Dell's MP3 player and Gateway's flat-screen televisions failed. Customers did not know what Dell stood for beyond computers.

Sinek maps the circle onto the brain. The neocortex handles language and rational thought and matches the what. The limbic brain handles feelings, trust and loyalty and, by his account, has no capacity for language. That is why people say a decision "feels right" and cannot explain it, and why a list of features rarely closes a sale. Communicating from why speaks to the part of the brain that decides.

Clarity, discipline, consistency

For the circle to work, each ring has a rule. The why needs clarity: you must know it and be able to say it. The how needs discipline: the values must be verbs people can act on, such as "always do the right thing," not nouns like "integrity" that sit on a wall. The what needs consistency: everything a company says and does must prove the why. Authenticity, in Sinek's definition, is simply when the three rings line up.

His cases are Southwest Airlines under Herb Kelleher, which existed to serve the ordinary person who could not afford to fly, and built cheap fares, a single aircraft type and a playful culture around that belief, and Continental Airlines under Gordon Bethune, who turned the worst airline in America into a profitable one by first fixing how employees were treated. Trust, in Sinek's account, is a feeling that grows when people see that you act from the same beliefs they hold.

Trust and the diffusion of innovations

Why matters for growth because of how ideas spread. Sinek uses Everett Rogers's law of diffusion of innovations: about 2.5 percent of a population are innovators, 13.5 percent early adopters, 34 percent early majority, 34 percent late majority and 16 percent laggards. The early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. So mass-market success depends on reaching a tipping point of roughly 15 to 18 percent, the innovators and early adopters.

Those people buy on belief, not on features. They stood in line for the first iPhone and paid $40,000 for the first flat-screen televisions. Sinek contrasts Apple with TiVo, which had the better product, strong funding and a device that skipped commercials, and still failed to take off because it marketed its features to the majority instead of its belief to the few who would spread the word.

The diffusion law also explains Martin Luther King Jr. He was not the only great speaker of the civil rights movement, and he did not tell people what needed to change. He told them what he believed, in a speech called "I Have a Dream," not "I Have a Plan." People who shared the belief came for themselves and told others. Leaders, Sinek says, need a following of people who believe what they believe.

Why types and how types

Sinek distinguishes people who hold the why from people who build the how. Walt Disney had the vision; his brother Roy built the company. Bill Gates imagined a computer on every desk; Paul Allen built the business. Herb Kelleher ran Southwest, but Rollin King had the idea. Steve Jobs needed Steve Wozniak. Why types are the optimists who see what does not yet exist. How types are the realists who make it real. Neither succeeds alone.

He pictures the organization as a megaphone: the why type at the narrow end, the how types around them, and the what, every product and employee, at the wide end facing the market. The leader's job is to be clear about the why; the organization's job is to carry it faithfully to the edge. A marketing message, a hiring decision or a product that does not match the why muffles the sound.

To test it he offers the celery test. Imagine people at a party tell you to buy Oreos, rice milk, celery and M&Ms. If you buy everything you waste money and nobody knows what you believe. If your why is to be healthy, you buy only rice milk and celery, and everyone can see it in your shopping cart. Decisions that pass the celery test are faster and cheaper, and they let customers and employees tell what you stand for.

The biggest challenge is success

Sinek's warning for growing companies is the split. At the start, why and what move together because the founder is in every decision. As the company grows, the what becomes measurable (sales, headcount, share price) and the why does not. Managers start to optimize what they can measure. The company keeps growing for a while, and then the passion drains out.

Walmart is the main example. Sam Walton built it to serve ordinary people and the towns it opened in. After he died in 1992 the company kept growing, but it became known for lawsuits, labor fights and towns that fought to keep it out. Nobody inside had made Walton's why explicit enough to pass on. Microsoft after Bill Gates stepped back, and Starbucks after Howard Schultz left, show the same drift; Schultz's return in 2008 was an attempt to restore the why. Sinek argues that the measure of a leader's success is whether the why survives the leader.

Discovering your why

The last part is Sinek's own story. In 2005 he ran a marketing business that paid the bills and lost all meaning for him. Working out why he did what he did, which he stated as inspiring people to do what inspires them, pulled him out. He argues that a why is not invented. It comes from looking back at the stories of who you are and what you already believed before you had a business. A company's why comes from its founders.

He closes with Apple's "Think Different" campaign and with Harley-Davidson customers who tattoo the logo on their bodies. Nobody tattoos a feature list. The new competition, he says, is not against rivals. It is against yourself: get clearer about your why, more disciplined about your how and more consistent in your what, and the right customers and employees will find you.

What the critics say

Reviewers note that the brain science is simplified past what research supports: the limbic system is not a language-free decision maker that works alone. The book draws most of its evidence from Apple and a few other favorable cases chosen after the fact, and it repeats its central point many times. Some also point out that a why can be written after success to explain it, which makes the theory hard to test.

Who should read it

Read it if you lead a company, a team or a cause and need people to follow an idea rather than a paycheck. Marketers, founders and managers get a simple test for whether their messages and decisions match what they claim to stand for.