Start With Why (11 page)

It’s hard to make a case to someone that your products or services are important in their lives based on external rational factors that
you
have defined as valuable (remember the Ferrari versus the Honda). However, if your WHYs and their WHY correspond, then they will see your products and services as tangible ways to prove what
they
believe. When WHY, HOW, and WHAT are in balance, authenticity is achieved and the buyer feels fulfilled. When they are out of balance, stress or uncertainty exists. When that happens, the decisions we make will also be out of balance. Without WHY, the buyer is easily motivated by aspiration or fear. At that point, it is the buyer who is at the greatest risk of ending up being inauthentic. If they buy something that doesn’t clearly embody their own sense of WHY, then those around them have little evidence to paint a clear and accurate picture of who they are.

The human animal is a social animal. We’re very good at sensing subtleties in behavior and judging people accordingly. We get good feelings and bad feelings about companies, just as we get good feelings and bad feelings about people. There are some people we just feel we can trust and others we just feel we can’t. Those feelings also manifest when organizations try to court us. Our ability to feel one way or another toward a person or an organization is the same. What changes is who is talking to us, but it is always a single individual who is listening. Even when a company airs its message on TV, for example, no matter how many people see the commercial, it is always and only an individual that can receive the message. This is the value of The Golden Circle; it provides a way to communicate consistent with how individuals receive information. For this reason an organization must be clear about its purpose, cause or belief and make sure that everything they say and do is consistent with and authentic to that belief. If the levels of The Golden Circle are in balance, all those who share the organization’s view of the world will be drawn to it and its products like a moth to a light bulb.

I’d like to introduce you to our imaginary friend Brad. Brad is going on a date tonight. It’s a first date and he’s pretty excited. He thinks the woman he’s about to meet is really beautiful and that she makes a great prospect. Brad sits down for dinner and he starts talking.

The question is, does Brad get a second date?

The way we communicate and the way we behave is all a matter of biology. That means we can make some comparisons between the things we do in our social lives and the things we do in our professional lives. After all, people are people. To learn how to apply WHY to a business situation, you needn’t look much farther than how we act on a date. Because, in reality, there is no difference between sales and dating. In both circumstances, you sit across a table from someone and hope to say enough of the right things to close the deal. Of course, you could always opt for a manipulation or two, a fancy dinner, dropping hints of tickets that you have or whom you know. Depending on how badly you want to close the deal, you could tell them anything they want to hear. Promise them the world and the odds are good that you will close the deal. Once. Maybe twice. With time, however, maintaining that relationship will cost more and more. No matter the manipulations you choose, this is not the way to build a trusting relationship.

In Brad’s case, it is obvious that the date did not go well. The odds are not good that he will get a second date, and he’s certainly not done a good job of laying down the foundation to build a relationship. Ironically, the woman’s initial interest may have been generated based on those elements. She agreed to go on the date because her friends told her that Brad was good-looking and that he had a good job and that he knew a lot of famous people. Even though all those things may be true, WHATs don’t drive decision-making, WHATs should be used as proof of WHY, and the date plainly fell flat.

Let’s send Brad out again, but this time he’s going to start with WHY.

“You know what I love about my life?” he starts this time. “I get to wake up every day to do something I love. I get to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. In fact, the best part is trying to figure out all the different ways I can do that. It really is amazing. And believe it or not, I’ve actually been able to make a lot of money from it. I bought a big house and a nice car. I get to meet lots of famous people and I get to be on TV all the time, which is fun, because I’m good-looking. I’m very lucky that I’m doing something that I love, I’ve actually been able to do pretty well because of it.”

This time the chances Brad will get a second date, assuming that whoever is sitting across from him believes what he believes, went up exponentially. More importantly, he’s also laying a good foundation for a relationship, one based on values and beliefs. He said all the same things as on the first date; the only difference is he started with WHY, and all the WHATs, all the tangible benefits, served as proof of that WHY.

Now consider how most companies do business. Someone sits down across a table from you, they’ve heard you’re a good prospect, and they start talking.

In business, like a bad date, many companies work so hard to prove their value without saying WHY they exist in the first place. You’ll have to do more than show your résumé before someone finds you appealing, however. But that is exactly what companies do. They provide you with a long list of their experience—WHAT they’ve done, whom they know—all with the idea that you will find them so desirable that you will have to drop everything to do business with them.

People are people and the biology of decision-making is the same no matter whether it is a personal decision or a business decision. It’s obvious that in the dating scenario it was a bad date, so why would we expect it to be any different in the business scenario?

Like on a date, it is exceedingly difficult to start building a trusting relationship with a potential customer or client by trying to convince them of all the rational features and benefits. Those things are important, but they serve only to give credibility to a sales pitch and allow buyers to rationalize their purchase decision. As with all decisions, people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it, and WHAT you do serves as the tangible proof of WHY you do it. But unless you start with WHY, all people have to go on are the rational benefits. And chances are you won’t get a second date.

Here’s the alternative:

“You know what I love about our company? Every single one of us comes to work every day to do something we love. We get to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. In fact, the fun part is trying to figure out all the different ways we can do that. It really is amazing. The best part is, it is also good for business. We do really well. We have beautiful offices, you should stop by sometime to see. We work with some of the biggest companies. I’m sure you’ve seen our ads. We’re actually doing pretty well.”

Now, how certain are you that the second pitch was better than the first?

When we can only provide a rational basis for a decision, when we can only point to tangible elements or rational measurements, the highest level of confidence we can give is, “I
think
this is the right decision.” That would be biologically accurate because we’re activating the neocortex, the “thinking” part of our brain. At a neocortical level we can verbalize our thoughts. This is what’s happening when we spend all that time sifting through the pros and cons, listening to all the differences between plasma or LCD, Dell versus HP.

When we make gut decisions, the highest level of confidence we can offer is, “The decision
feels
right,” even if it flies in the face of all the facts and figures. Again, this is biologically accurate, because gut decisions happen in the part of the brain that controls our emotions, not language. Ask the most successful entrepreneurs and leaders what their secret is and invariably they all say the same thing: “I trust my gut.” The times things went wrong, they will tell you, “I listened to what others were telling me, even though it didn’t feel right. I should have trusted my gut.” It’s a good strategy, except it’s not scalable. The gut decision can only be made by a single person. It’s a perfectly good strategy for an individual or a small organization, but what happens when success necessitates that more people be able to make decisions that
feel
right?

That’s when the power of WHY can be fully realized. The ability to put a WHY into words provides the emotional context for decisions. It offers greater confidence than “I think it’s right.” It’s more scalable than “I feel it’s right.” When you know your WHY, the highest level of confidence you can offer is, “I
know
it’s right.” When you
know
the decision is right, not only does it feel right, but you can also rationalize it and easily put it into words. The decision is fully balanced. The rational WHATs offer proof for the feeling of WHY. If you can verbalize the feeling that drove the gut decision, if you can clearly state your WHY, you’ll provide a clear context for those around you to understand why that decision was made. If the decision is consistent with the facts and figures, then those facts and figures serve to reinforce the decision—this is balance. And if the decision flies in the face of all the facts and figures then it will highlight the other factors that need to be considered. It can turn a controversial decision from a debate into a discussion.

My former business partner, for example, would get upset when I turned away business. I would tell him that a potential client didn’t “feel” right. That would frustrate him to no end because “the client’s money was as good as everyone else’s,” he would tell me. He couldn’t understand the reason for my decision and, worse, I couldn’t explain it. It was just a feeling I had. In contrast, these days I can easily explain WHY I’m in business—to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. If I were to make the same decision now for the same gut reason, there is no debate because everyone is clear WHY the decision was made. We turn away business because those potential clients don’t believe what we believe and they are not interested in anything to do with inspiring people. With a clear sense of WHY, a debate to take on a bad-fit client turns into a discussion of whether the imbalance is worth the short-term gain they may give us.

The goal of business should not be to do business with anyone who simply wants what you have. It should be to focus on the people who believe what you believe. When we are selective about doing business only with those who believe in our WHY, trust emerges.

To say that most of the company’s employees were embarrassed to work there was an understatement. It was no secret that the employees felt mistreated. And if a company mistreats their people, just watch how the employees treat their customers. Mud rolls down a hill, and if you’re the one standing at the bottom, you get hit with the full brunt. In a company, that’s usually the customer. Throughout the 1980s, this was life at Continental Airlines—the worst airline in the industry.

“I could see Continental’s biggest problem the second I walked in the door in February of 1994,” Gordon Bethune wrote in
From Worst to First
, the chief executive’s firsthand account of Continental’s turnaround. “It was a crummy place to work.” Employees were “surly to customers, surly to each other, and ashamed of their company. And you can’t have a good product without people who like coming to work. It just can’t be done,” he recounts.

Herb Kelleher, the head of Southwest for twenty years, was considered a heretic for positing the notion that it is a company’s responsibility to look after the employees first. Happy employees ensure happy customers, he said. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders—in that order. Fortunately, Bethune shared this heretical belief.

Some would argue that the reason Continental’s culture was so poisonous was that the company was struggling. They would tell you that it’s hard for executives to focus on anything other than survival when a company is facing hard times. “Once we get profitable again,” the logic went, “then we will take a look at everything else.” And without a doubt, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Continental struggled. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection twice in eight years—once in 1983 and again in 1991—and managed to go through ten CEOs in a decade. In 1994, the year Bethune took over as the newest CEO, the company had lost $600 million and ranked last in every measurable performance category.

But all that didn’t last long once Bethune arrived. The very next year Continental made $250 million and was soon ranked as one of the best companies to work for in America. And while Bethune made significant changes to improve the operations, the greatest gains were in a performance category that is nearly impossible to measure: trust.

Trust does not emerge simply because a seller makes a rational case why the customer should buy a product or service, or because an executive promises change. Trust is not a checklist. Fulfilling all your responsibilities does not create trust. Trust is a feeling, not a rational experience. We trust some people and companies even when things go wrong, and we don’t trust others even though everything might have gone exactly as it should have. A completed checklist does not guarantee trust. Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own self-gain.