Start With Why (14 page)

Dream teams are not always so dreamy. When a team of experts comes together they often work for themselves and not for the good of the whole. This is what happens when companies feel the need to pay mega-salaries to “get the best talent.” Those people are not necessarily showing up because they believe in your WHY, they are showing up for the money. A classic manipulation. Paying someone a lot of money and asking them to come up with great ideas ensures very little. However, pulling together a team of like-minded people and giving them a cause to pursue ensures a greater sense of teamwork and camaraderie. Langley pulled together a dream team and promised them riches. The Wright brothers inspired a group of people to join them in pursuit of something bigger than each member of the team. Average companies give their people something to work on. In contrast, the most innovative organizations give their people something to work toward.

The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen. It is the people inside the company, those on the front lines, who are best qualified to find new ways of doing things. The people who answer the phones and talk to customers, for example, can tell you more about the kinds of questions they get than can anyone sitting in an executive suite miles away. If the people inside a company are told to come to work and just do their job, that’s all they will do. If they are constantly reminded WHY the company was founded and told to always look for ways to bring that cause to life while performing their job, however, then they will do more than their job.

Steve Jobs, for example, did not personally come up with the iPod or iTunes or the iPhone. Others inside the company did. Jobs gave people a filter, a context, a higher purpose around which to innovate: find existing status-quo industries, those in which companies fight to protect their old-fashioned business models, and challenge them. This is WHY Apple was founded, it is what Jobs and Wozniak did when they started the company, and it is what Apple’s people and products have done ever since. It’s a repeating pattern. Apple’s employees simply look for ways to bring their cause to life in as many places as they can. And it works.

It is not the same at many other companies. Companies that define themselves by WHAT they do instead of WHY they do it instruct their people to be innovative around a product or service. “Make it better,” they are instructed. Those who work for Apple’s competitors, companies that have defined themselves as “computer manufacturers,” come to work to develop “more innovative” computers. The best they can do is add more RAM, add a feature or two, or, as one PC maker has done, give people the option to customize the color of their computer casing. This hardly qualifies as an idea with the potential to change the course of an industry. A nice feature, for sure, but not innovation. If you are curious as to how Colgate finds itself with thirty-two different types of toothpaste today, it is because every day its people come to work to develop a better toothpaste and not, for example, to look for ways to help people feel more confident about themselves.

Apple does not have a lock on good ideas; there are smart, innovative thinkers at most companies. But great companies give their people a purpose or challenge around which to develop ideas rather than simply instruct them to make a better mousetrap. Companies that study their competitors in hopes of adding the features and benefits that will make
their
products “better” are only working to entrench the company in WHAT it does. Companies with a clear sense of WHY tend to ignore their competition, whereas those with a fuzzy sense of WHY are obsessed with what others are doing.

The ability of a company to innovate is not just useful for developing new ideas, it is invaluable for navigating struggle. When people come to work with a higher sense of purpose, they find it easier to weather hard times or even to find opportunity in those hard times. People who come to work with a clear sense of WHY are less prone to giving up after a few failures because they understand the higher cause. Thomas Edison, a man definitely driven by a higher cause, said, “I didn’t find a way to make a lightbulb, I found a thousand ways how not to make one.”

Southwest Airlines is famous for pioneering the ten-minute turnaround—the ability to deplane, prep, and board a plane in ten minutes. This ability helps an airline make more money, because the more the planes are in the sky, the better the company is doing. What few people realize is that this innovation was born out of struggle. In 1971, Southwest was running low on cash and needed to sell one of their aircraft to stay in business. This left them with three planes to fly a schedule that required four. They had two choices: they could scale back their operations, or they could figure out how to turn their planes around in ten minutes. And thus was born the ten-minute turnaround.

Whereas most other airline employees would have simply said it couldn’t be done, Southwest’s people rallied to figure out how to perform the unprecedented and seemingly impossible task. Today, their innovation is still paying dividends. Because of increased airport congestion and larger planes and cargo loads, Southwest now takes about twenty-five minutes to turn their planes around. However, if they were to try to keep the same schedule but add even five minutes to the turnaround time, they would need an additional eighteen planes in their fleet at a cost of nearly a billion dollars.

Southwest’s remarkable ability to solve problems, Apple’s remarkable knack for innovation and the Wright brothers’ ability to develop a technology with the team they had were all possible for the same reason: they believed they could and they trusted their people to do it.

Founded by Sir Francis Baring in 1762, Barings Bank was the oldest merchant bank in England. The bank, which survived the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and World War II, was unable to survive the predilection for risk of one self-proclaimed rogue trader. Nick Leeson single-handedly brought down Barings Bank in 1995 by performing some unauthorized, extremely high-risk trades. Had the proverbial winds continued to blow in the right direction, Leeson would have made himself and the bank extremely rich and he would have been hailed as a hero.

But such is the nature of unpredictable things like the weather and financial markets. Few dispute that what Leeson was doing was anything more than gambling. And gambling is very different from calculated risk. Calculated risk accepts that there can be great loses, but steps are taken to either guard against or respond to an unlikely but possible outcome. Even though an emergency landing on water is “unlikely,” as the airlines tell us, they still provide us lifejackets. And if only for peace of mind, we’re glad they do. To do otherwise is a gamble few airlines would be willing to take, even though the actuarial tables are heavily weighted on their side.

Leeson strangely held two positions at Barings, ostensibly serving as both a trader and his own supervisor, but that fact is not interesting given the subject matter. That one man had such a tolerance for risk that he could create so much damage is not very interesting either. Both of those are short-term factors. Both would have ended if Leeson had either left the company or changed jobs, or if Barings had assigned a new supervisor to oversee his operations. What is more interesting is the culture at the bank that could allow these conditions to exist in the first place. Barings had lost its WHY.

The culture at Barings was no longer one in which people came to work inspired. Motivated, yes, but not inspired. Manipulated by the promise of massive payouts for performance, for sure, but not inspired to work in the best interest of the whole. As Leeson reported in his own account of how he got away with such risky behavior for so long, he said it was not that others didn’t recognize that what he was doing was potentially dangerous. It was worse than that. There was a stigma against speaking out. “People at the London end of Barings,” Leeson explained, “were all so know-all that nobody dared ask a stupid question in case they looked silly in front of everyone else.” The lack of a clear set of values and beliefs, along with the weak culture that resulted, created the conditions for an every-man-for-himself environment, the long-term impact of which could yield little else than disaster. This is caveman stuff. If the people aren’t looking out for the community, then the benefits of a community erode. Many companies have star employees and star salesmen and so on, but few have a culture that produces great people as a rule and not an exception.

Trust is a remarkable thing. Trust allows us to rely on others. We rely on those we trust for advice to help us make decisions. Trust is the bedrock for the advancement of our own lives, our families, our companies, our societies and our species. We trust those in our community to care for our children so we can go out to dinner. Given the choice between two babysitters, we’re more likely to trust a babysitter with a little experience from the neighborhood than one with lots of experience from far away. We wouldn’t trust someone from the outside because we don’t know anything about them, we say. The reality is, we don’t know anything about the local babysitter either, beyond the fact that she’s from the neighborhood. In this case, we trust familiarity over experience with something quite important—the safety of our children. We trust that someone who lives in the community and more likely shares our values and beliefs is better qualified to care for the most valuable thing in our lives over someone with a long résumé but from an unfamiliar place. That’s pretty remarkable. It causes some pause when we consider how we hire people: what’s more important, their résumé and experience, or whether they will fit our community? Our children are probably more important than the position we want to fill at the organization, yet we seem to exercise a very different standard. Is there a false assumption at play here as to who makes the best employee?

Historically, trust has played a bigger role in advancing companies and societies than skill set alone. Like the couple leaving their children while they go out on a date for the evening, groups from within a society would go off with confidence, knowing that their homes and families would be safe upon their return. If there were no trust, then no one would take risks. No risks would mean no exploration, no experimentation and no advancement of the society as a whole. That’s a remarkable concept: only when individuals can trust the culture or organization will they take personal risks in order to advance that culture or organization as a whole. For no other reason than, in the end, it’s good for their own personal health and survival.

No matter how experienced, no matter how proficient, a trapeze artist will not attempt a totally new death-defying leap without first trying it with a net below him. And depending on how death-defying the trick is, he may insist on always having a net when performing the trick. Besides its obvious advantage of catching you if you fall, the net also provides a psychological benefit. Knowing it is there gives the trapeze artist the confidence to try something he’s never done before, or to do it again and again. Remove the net and he will only do the safe tricks, the ones he knows he can land. The more he trusts the quality of the net, the more he will take personal risks to make his act better. The trust the circus management gives him by providing him a net is probably afforded to other performers too. Soon all the performers will feel confident to try new things and push themselves further. That collection of personal confidence and personal risk results in the entire circus putting on a much better show. An overall better show means more customers. And the system thrives. But not without trust. For those within a community, or an organization, they must trust that their leaders provide a net—practical or emotional. With that feeling of support, those in the organization are more likely to put in extra effort that ultimately benefits the group as a whole.

I will admit that there are always those who will take the risk, for the first time or repeatedly, without the net. There will always be those who will explore regardless of who is home holding down the fort. These people sometimes earn their rightful spots as the innovators. The ones who pushed further, the ones who did things no one else would do. Some of them may advance a business or even society. And some of them end up dead before they achieve anything.

There is big a difference between jumping out of a plane with a parachute on and jumping without one. Both produce extraordinary experiences, but only one increases the likelihood of being able to try again another time. A trapeze artist with a personality predisposed to taking extraordinary risks without a net may be the star attraction in an otherwise mediocre show. But if he dies or leaves for another circus, then what? This is the paradigm in which someone is motivated by self-gain regardless of the consequences or the benefits to the organization for which he or she works. In such a case, the effort may be good for the individual and it may be good for the group, but the benefits, especially for the group, come with a time limit. Over time, this system will break down, often to the detriment of the organization. Developing trust to encourage people other than those with a predilection for risk, like Nick Leeson, is a better long-term strategy.

Great organizations become great because the people inside the organization feel protected. The strong sense of culture creates a sense of belonging and acts like a net. People come to work knowing that their bosses, colleagues and the organization as a whole will look out for them. This results in reciprocal behavior. Individual decisions, efforts and behaviors that support, benefit and protect the long-term interest of the organization as a whole.

Southwest Airlines, a company renowned for its customer focus, does not, as a matter of policy, believe the customer is always right. Southwest will not tolerate customers who abuse their staff. They would rather those customers fly on a different airline. It’s a subtle irony that one of the best customer service companies in the country focuses on its employees before its customers. The trust between the management and the employees, not dogma, is what produces the great customer service. It is a prerequisite, then, for someone to trust the culture in which they work to share the values and beliefs of that culture. Without it, that employee, for example, is simply a bad fit and likely to work only for self-gain without consideration for the greater good. But if those inside the organization are a good fit, the opportunity to “go the extra mile,” to explore, to invent, to innovate, to advance and, more importantly, to do so again and again and again, increases dramatically. Only with mutual trust can an organization become great.