KNOWING THE WHY

Knowing your ‘why’ can help you with the ‘how’ (not to mention the ‘ka-ching!’). Andy Kenworthy talks to a collection of business leaders who keep their purpose in focus at all times

simon sinek has a simple proposition.

He argues that people are inspired to support certain organisations and buy their products not because of what they do or how they do it, but why they do it.

Sinek’s most concise exposition of this insight was in a 2009 TEDx talk filmed in a small room in Newcastle, USA. It’s now been viewed more than 15 million times and is the seventh most viewed TED talk out there. He also produced a book on the same subject, Start With Why: How Great

Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, and has since worked with the likes of Microsoft, MARS, SAP, Intel, 3M, the US military and a host of others.

“All the great leaders and organisations in the world all think act and communicate the exact same way and it’s the opposite to the way that everybody else does,” he says. “Every single organisation on the planet knows what they do, and some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiating value proposition, your proprietary process or your USP. But very few people or organisations know why they do what they do. By why I don’t mean to make a profit that’s a result. By why I mean what’s your purpose, your cause and your belief. Why do you get out of bed in the morning and why would anyone care?”

Interestingly, and perhaps most arguably, he asserts that this idea is directly reflected in the structure of the human brain. For Sinek, this is where ‘gut reactions’ come from. Since the part of the brain that deals with feelings does not ‘do’ language, so these feelings cannot be truly expressed or appealed to directly but come from the establishment of trust through a whole host of more subtle triggers. And this is the part of the brain that truly guides most of our decisions, with the rest of the brain simply rationalising the decisions that have in fact already been made.

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” he says. “The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have, the goal is to do business with everybody who believes what you believe.”