How great leaders inspire everyone to take an action!
Most companies have no clue why their customers are their customers. This is a fascinating realization.
What companies do are external factors, but why they do it is something deeper. Their products give life to their course. Their advertising don’t offer exhaustive descriptions of product details: it is not about them, it is about us. And we understand why we want it.
Just producing high-quality products and marketing them does not guarantee success. You are back to being like everyone else. Authenticity is when you say and do the things you actually believe. Trust is not a checklist. Fulfilling all your responsibilities does not create trust. Trust is a feeling, not a rational experience. When you force people to make decisions with only the rational part of their brain, they almost invariably end up “overthinking”. Decisions made with the limbic brain, gut decisions, tend to be faster, higher-quality decisions.
Some companies turn from that have a cause into companies that sell products. And when that happens, price, quality, service and features become the primary currency to motivate a purchase decision. They can manipulate it or they can inspire it. Manipulations work, such as promotions. In the business-to-business world, promotions are called “value added”. And like price, promotions work. The gains are only short-term. This only drives a need to sell more to compensate.
When faced with a result that doesn’t go according to plan, a series of perfectly effective short-term tactics are used until the desired outcome is achieved, such as increasing volume. Volume is reasonably easy to achieve. All it takes is money or stunts. But neither plants seeds of loyalty. Loyalty-is when people are willing to suffer some inconvenience or pay a premium to do business with you. Loyalty is not easily won. Repeat business, however is. All it takes is more manipulations. Because manipulations work, they have become the norm.
Inspiration only starts the process; you need something more to drive a movement. But no matter how inspiring a dream may be, a dream that cannot come to life stays a dream. Though positive in nature, aspirational messages are most effective with those who lack discipline or have a nagging fear or insecurity that they don’t have the ability to achieve their dreams on their own (which, at various times for various reasons, is everyone). Aspirational messages can spur behaviour, but for the most, it won’t last. This short-term response to long-term desires is alive. Like so many before it, the company confused innovation with novelty. Latest shiny object for people to get excited about until a new shiny object came out. And that’s the reason these features are more a novelty than an innovation.
Apple didn’t invent the lifestyle, nor does it sell a lifestyle. Apple is simply one of the brands that those who live a certain lifestyle are drawn to.
Successful companies don’t think of themselves as being like anyone else and they don’t have to “convince” anyone of their value. They don’t need complex systems of carrots and sticks. They are different and everyone knows it. They start with why in everything they say and do. It is not a debate about better or worse anymore, it’s a discussion about different needs. The need to belong. A sense of purpose or belonging that has little to do with any external incentive or benefit to be gained. The motivation to act is deeply personal.
There are leaders and there are those who lead!
Their impact is not easily copied. The ones who pushed further, the ones who did things no one else would do. Great leaders are good at seeing what most of us can’t see. They are those who understand the art before the science. They win hearts before minds. They are the ones who start with why. Leadership requires people to stick with you through thick and thin. Leadership is the ability to rally people not for a single event, but for years. Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics.
The drive to win is not, per se, a bad thing.
Problems arise, however, when the metric becomes the only measure of success, when what you achieve is no longer tied to why you set out to achieve it in the first place. But it takes more than a competitive nature, a strong work ethic and a sense of optimism to build a company big enough to equal the twenty-third-largest economy in the world. Value is a feeling, not a calculation. It is a perception. When that happens, loyal buyers will always rationalize the premium they pay or the inconvenience they suffer to get that feeling.
Measure things the employees can truly control. Make the stakes something the employees would win or lose on together, not seperately.
None of the executives are considered God’s gift to management. Steve Job’s paranoia, for example, is well documented, and Bill Gates is socially awkward. Their companies thousands of people deep and they alone can’t pull all the strings or push all the buttons to make everything wok properly. They rely on people who share their cause. Company is nothing more than a collection of people. You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills. Hire only passionate people. But how do you know if someone is passionate for interviewing, but not so passionate for working? Simply hiring people with a solid resume or great work ethic does not guarantee success. Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. The purpose should be to leave the organization in a better way than we found it. It’s not the work we do that inspires us either. It’s the cause we come to work for. We don’t want to come to work to build a wall, we want to come to work to build a cathedral.
Golden Circle in balance: clarity, discipline and consistency
Self-interest becomes the overwhelming motivation. Energy excites. Charisma inspires. Energy motivates but charisma inspires. Energy is easy to see, easy to measure and easy to copy. Charisma is hard to define, near impossible to measure and too elusive to copy. It comes from absolute conviction in an ideal bigger than one self. Energy, in contrast comes from a good night’s sleep or lots of caffeine. Energy can excite. But only charisma can inspire. Charisma commands loyalty. Energy does not. Energy can always be injected into an organization to motivate people to do things. Bonuses, promotions, other carrots and even few sticks can get people to work harder, for sure, but the gains are, like all manipulations, short-term.
For every great leader, for every Why-type, there is an inspired How-type or group of How-types who take the intangible cause and build the infrastructure that can give it life.
That infrastructure is what actually makes any measurable change or success possible. The leader sits at the top of the cone – at the start, the point of WHY-while the How-types sit below and are responsible for actually making things happen. The leader imagines the destination and the How-types find the route to get there. Why-types are the visionaries, the ones with the overactive imaginations. How-types live more in the here and now. They are the realists and have a clearer sense of all things practical. Why-types are focused on the things most people cant’s see, like the future. How-types are focused on things most people can see and tend to be better at building structures and processes, and getting things done. One is not better than the other, they are just different ways people naturally see and experience the world.
Without someone inspired by their vision and the knowledge to make it reality, most Why-types end up starving visionaries, people with all the answers but never accomplishing much themselves. Although so many of them fancy themselves visionaries, in reality most successful entrepreneurs are how-types.
Steve Jobs is the rebel’s evangelist, but Steve Wozniak is the engineer who made the Apple work. Jobs had the vision, Woz had the goods. This relationship starts to clarify the difference between a vision and a mission statement in an organization. For Steve Wozniak and Steve Job, the cofounders of Apple Computer, the battlefield was business and the weapon of choice was the personal computer.
The vision is the public statement of the founder’s intent, Why the company exists. It is literally the vision of a future that does not yet exist. The mission statement is a description of the route, the guiding principles – How the company intends to create that future.
When a company is small, it revolves around the personality of the founder. The founder’s why must be extracted and integrated into the culture of the company. A company is a culture. And success is a team sport. When we don’t know an organization’s why, we don’t know what to expect, so we expect the minimum – price, quality, service, features – the commodity stuff. It is not just what or how you do things that matters, what matters more is that what and how you do things is consistent with your why. A why provides the clear filter for decision-making . Any decisions – hiring, partnerships, strategies and tactics – should all pass the Celery test.
For passion to survive, it needs structure. A why without the HOWs, passion without structure, has a very high probability of failure. Passion may need structure to survive, but for structure to grow, it needs passion. Whereas gut was the filter for early decisions, rational cases and empirical data often serve as the sole basis for later decisions.
Howard D. Schultz had been enamored of the espresso bars of Italy – his vision of building a comfortable environment between work and home, the third space as he called it. It was that idea that people bought, not the coffee.
All organizations start with why, but only great ones keep their why clear year after year. Imagine if every organization started with Why. Decisions would be simplier. Loyalties would be greater.