Start with Why (Simon Sinek)
Not with What, Not with How, But with WHY…
My top-3 learnings from the book:
- Why to start with WHY?
For the first few pages of the book, I was not yet fully convinced on why to start with why — WHY seemed a bit too fuzzy and “good-to-have” for me until this happened…
This anecdote completely changed my perspective — it told me that the WHY is no longer a “good to have” but a “must have” to stay relevant and stand the test of time, and that WHY will be your north-star that will help you make the right decisions and pivots — be it in the context of an organization or even in life at large.
2. Selling your WHY to your employees — “School Bus Test”
If a founder or leader of an organization were to be hit by a school bus, would the organization continue to thrive at the same pace without them at the helm?
Most often when the leader leaves an organization, the organization struggles to perform as well as it was when led by the founder. At times it even struggles for survival. The main reason is the people who carry the baton didn’t get “WHY the organization exists” — their purpose got fuzzy, steering away from that of the founders, and customers no longer resonate with the new purpose. For an organization to pass the school bus test, the organization’s founder needs to cascade the founding purpose to the team — the WHY should be embedded into the organization’s culture and should reflect in their actions.
There is relevance to founders or leaders cascading the WHY to the team even in the day-to-day running of an organization. The founder cannot be with every employee all the time closely monitoring their actions and performing course corrections. If every employee starts seeing their organization’s WHY for themselves and act accordingly, then such an organization is here to stay!
3. Selling your WHY to your customers
The law of diffusion of innovation essentially talks about the bell curve of product or technology adoption. A-sixth or so of your users fall under the bucket of “innovators” or “early adopters” — these are essentially the people who are experiencing the problem you are trying to solve and don’t really care about how you are solving it or whether you are solving it fully at all — all they care is that you are helping them move the needle in the right direction — in other words, “they buy your why”!
The mistake we often make is we start by selling our “what” —which essentially targets the middle 70 odd percent. But the problem is no product is perfect when it starts off and this group expects perfection from you or validation from other buyers before they buy your product. You are not getting there till your product gets the validation of the innovators and early adopters — who buy the “why” not the what. They are comfortable and willing to suffer an inconvenience to be an early embracer of what you are trying to sell — but only if they see a purpose or the WHY you are selling what you are selling.
Contact me at vishalgan[at]gmail[dot]com for exchanging learnings and takeaways on this book, similar books or any book for that matter :~)
