One of the most inspiring books of the last few years. And it is so true, that only with a clear WHY, you can actually make a difference. The document is an abstract of the book Start with WHY from Simon Sinek. You should however absolutely read the book, which contains a lot of appealing cases.

1. Start with WHY
This document is prepared by Wilco Sinnema, based on the book of Simon Sinek.
www.startwithwhy.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

2. 1. Assume You Know
2. Carrots and Sticks
3. The Golden Circle
4. This Is Not Opinion, This Is
Biology
5. Clarity, Discipline and
Consistency
6. The Emergence of Trust
7. How a Tipping Point Tips
8. Start with WHY, but Know
HOW
9. Know WHY. Know HOW. Then
WHAT?
10. Communication Is Not About
Speaking, It’s About Listening
11. When WHY Goes Fuzzy
12. Split Happens
13. The Origins of a WHY
14. The New Competition
- Assumptions
- Manipulation
- People don’t buy what you do,
they buy WHY you do it
- Brain: Decision-making vs
Language
- WHY, HOW and WHAT
2

3. 1. Assume You Know
• We make decisions based on what we know
• Our behavior is affected by our assumptions or
our perceived truths
3

4. 2. Carrots and Sticks
• Manipulation vs Inspiration
• Manipulations:
– Price
– Promotions
– Fear
– Aspirations
– Peer pressure
– Novelty (a.k.a. Innovation)
• Trade-off: Transactions ≠ Loyalty
4

5. 3. The Golden Circle
People don’t buy WHAT you do,
they buy WHY you do it.
5

6. 3. The Golden Circle
• Purpose
• Cause
• Belief
6

7. 4. This Is Biology
• This Is Not Opinion, This Is Biology
7

8. • Limbic brain is
responsible for feelings
– trust loyalty, etc.
– Behavior
– Decision-making
• Neocortex is responsible
for rational and analytic
thought and language
4. This Is Biology
8

9. 4. This Is Biology
• Companies that fail to communicate a sense of
WHY force us to make decisions with only
empirical evidence – facts
• When a decision feels right, we have a hard
time explaining it – we rationalize
9

10. 5. Clarity, Discipline and Consistency
• Clarity = WHY
• Discipline = HOW
• Consistency = WHAT – authenticity
10

11. 5. Clarity, Discipline and Consistency
• HOWs are values or principles that guide
HOW to bring your cause (=WHY) to life
– Systems
– Processes
– Culture
• WHATs: everything you say and do: products,
services, marketing, PR, culture, and who you
hire
• WHAT should be a tangible proof of the WHY
11

12. 5. Clarity, Discipline and Consistency
• WHY is a belief
• HOWs are the actions you take to realize that
belief
• WHATs are the results of those actions
12

13. 6. Emergence of Trust
• Feeling
• Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense
that another person / organization is driven by
things other than their own self-gain
• With trust comes a sense of value
• Those who lead are able to do so because those
who follow trust that the decisions made at the
top have the best interest of the group at heart
• Trust allows us to rely on others
13

14. 6. Emergence of Trust
• Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate
them, they hire already motivated people and inspire
them
• Average companies give their people something to
work on; innovative organizations give their people
something to work toward
• Companies with a clear sense of WHY tend to ignore
competition, whereas those with a fuzzy sense of WHY
are obsessed with what others are doing
• Great organizations become great because the people
inside the organization feel protected
14

15. 6. Emergence of Trust
• Only when individuals can trust the culture or organization
they will take personal risks in order to advance that culture
or organization as a whole
• 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
• 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
• Passion comes from feeling like you are a part of something
that you believe in, something bigger than yourself
15

16. 7. How a Tipping Point Tips
• The Law of Diffusion of Innovations –
explains the spread of ideas
16

17. 7. How a Tipping Point Tips
• Innovators and early adopters rely heavily on their intuition
– they trust their gut
• The early and late majority are more practical-minded – for
them, rational factors matter more
• The farther right you go on the curve, the more you will
encounter the clients and customers who may need what
you have, but don’t necessarily believe what you believe
• The ability to get the system to tip is the point at which the
growth of a business or spreading of an idea start to move at
an extra-ordinary pace
• (…) The importance of identifying this group is so that you
can avoid doing business with them
17

18. 7. How a Tipping Point Tips
• The goal of business should not be to simply sell to
anyone who wants what you have – the majority – but
rather to find people who believe what you believe (the
left side of the bell curve); they are the ones who (…)
will tell others about you – who share your beliefs and
want to incorporate your ideas, your products and your
services into their lives (as WHATs to their own
WHYs)
• Get enough of the people on the left side of the curve
on your side and they encourage the rest to follow
18

19. 8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW
• Charisma (…) comes from a clarity of WHY; it comes
from absolute conviction in an ideal bigger than oneself
• All the things (…) charismatic leaders did were
tangible ways they found to bring their WHYs to life –
none of them could have imagined WHAT they would
be doing when they were young
• The vision and charisma of the leader are enough to
attract the innovators and the early adopters; trusting
their guts and their intuition, these people will make the
greatest sacrifices to help see the vision become a
reality
19

20. 8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW
The HOW level
represents a person or a
small group
responsible for
building the
infrastructure that can
make a WHY tangible
20

21. 8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW
• 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
• The leader imagines the destination and the HOW-types find
the route to get there
• HOW-types know HOW to make the cause actionable and
tangible
• HOW-types live more in the here and now – they are the
realists and have a clear sense of all things practical
• WHY-types are focused on the things most people can’t see;
HOW-types are focused on things people can see and tend
to be better at building structures and processes and gtd
21

22. 8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW
It is the partnership of a vision of the future and the talent
to get it done that makes and organization great:
• This relationship starts to clarify the difference between
a vision statement and a mission statement
• The vision is the public statement of the founder’s
intent, WHY the company exists – it is literally the
future that does not exist yet
• The mission statement is a description of the route, the
guiding principles – HOW the company intends to
create that future
22

23. 8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW
• Build a megaphone that works
• Clarity of purpose, cause of belief is important,
but it equally important that people hear you; for a
WHY to have the power to move people it must
not only be clear, it must be amplified to reach
enough people to tip the scale
• Say it only if you believe it; a clear sense of WHY
sets expectations – it requires the everyone in the
organization be held accountable to HOW you do
things
23

24. 9. Know WHY. Know HOW. The WHAT?
• Organization
– Hierarchical
– Organized
• Marketplace
– Nonhierarchical
– Inherently chaotic and disorganized
24

25. 9. Know WHY. Know HOW. The WHAT?
The only contact that the organized system has with the
disorganized system is at the WHAT level
• Everything an organization says and does
communicates the leader’s vision to the outside world
• All the products and services that a company sells, all
the marketing and advertising, all the contact with the
world outside communicate this
• If people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you
do it, and if all the things happening at the WHAT-level
do not clearly represent WHY the company exists, then
the ability to inspire is severly complicated
25

26. 9. Know WHY. Know HOW. The WHAT?
As the cone demonstrates, the CEO’s job, the
leader’s responsibility, is not to focus on the
outside market – it’s to focus on the layer
directly beneath: HOW
26

27. 10. Communication Is Not About
Speaking, It’s About Listening
• The Cellery Test:
– M&M’s, rice milk, Oreo cookies and/or cellery
– What if your WHY is to do only things that are healty? To
always do the things that are good for your body?
• It is not just WHAT and HOW you do things that
matters; what matters more is that WHAT and HOW
you do things is consistent with your WHY
• With a WHY clearly stated in an organization, anyone
within the organization can make a decision as clearly
and as accurately as the founder; a WHY provides the
clear filter for decision-making
27

28. 11. When WHY Goes Fuzzy
• Being successful vs feeling succesful
• Achievement vs success:
– Achievement is something you reach or attain, like
a goal – something tangible, clearly defined and
measurable
– Success is a feeling or a state of being
– Achievement comes when you pursue and attain
WHAT you want
– Success comes when you are clear in pursuit of
WHY you want it
28

29. 12. Split Happens
• At the beginning, ideas are fueled by passion –
that very compelling emotion that causes us to do
quite irrational things
• But most of us, unfortunately, reach a place where
WHAT we are doing and WHY we are doing it
eventually fall out of balance; it is the separation
of the tangible and the intangible that marks the
split
• The challenge (isn’t to cling to the leader) is to
find effective ways to keep the founding vision
alive forever
29

30. 12. Split Happens
• The 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
• To pass the School Bus Test, for an
organization to continue to inspire and lead
beyond the lifetime of its founder, the
founder’s WHY must be extracted and
integrated into the culture of the company
30

31. 12. Split Happens
• When people can point to a company and
clearly articulate what the company believes
and use words unrelated to price, quality,
service and features, that is proof the company
has successfully navigated the split
• When people describe the value the perceive
with visceral, excited words like “love”, that is
a sure sign that a clear sense of WHY exists
31

32. 12. Split Happens
• Good successions keep the WHY alive
• When the person who personifies the WHY
departs without clearly articulating WHY the
company was founded in the first place, they
leave no clear cause for their successor to lead
• Great second or third CEOs don’t take the helm to
implement their own vision of the future; they
pick up the original banner and lead the company
into the next generation – that’s why it’s called
succession, not replacement
32

33. 13. The Origins of WHY
• The WHY comes from looking back
• Finding WHY is process of discovery (not
invention)
• Gaining clarity of WHY (ironically) is not the
hard part; it is the discipline to trust one’s guts,
to stay to one’s purpose, cause or beliefs;
remaining completely in balance and authentic
is the most difficult part
33

34. 14. The New Competition
• If you follow your WHY, then others will
follow you
• We’re always competing against someone else
• We’re always comparing ourselves to others
• What if we showed up to work every day
simply to be better than ourselves?
34

35. 14. The New Competition
- “Who’s you competition?”
“No idea.”
- “Well, what makes you better than your competition?”
“We’re not better than them in all cases.”
- “Well, why should I do business with you then?”
“Because the work we’re doing now is better than the work we were doing six
months ago. And the work we’ll be doing six months from now will be better
than the work we’re doing today.
Because we wake up every day with a sense of WHY we come to work. We
come to inspire people to do things that inspire them. Are we better than our
competition?
If you believe what we believe and you believe that the things we do can help
you, than we’re better. If you don’t believe what we believe and you don’t
believe the things we can do will help you, them we’re not better.
35

36. 14. The New Competition
Our goal is to find customers who believe what we believe and work together
so that we can all succeed. We’re looking for people to stand shoulder-to-
shoulder with us in pursuit of the same goal. We’re not interested in sitting
across a table from each other in pursuit of a sweeter deal. And here are the
things we’re doing to advance our cause…”
36