Start With Why

yields one consistent result: stress.
    For the companies too, whose obligation it is to help us decide, their ability to do so has gotten more and more difficult. Every day, the competition is doing something new, something better. To constantly have to come up with a new promotion, a new guerrilla marketing tactic, a new feature to add, is hard work. Combined with the long-term effects of years of short-term decisions that have eroded profit margins, this raises stress levels inside organizations as well. When manipulations are the norm, no one wins.
    It’s not an accident that doing business today, and being in the workforce today, is more stressful than it used to be. Peter Whybrow, in his book American Mania: When More Is Not Enough , argues that many of the ills that we suffer from today have very little to do with the bad food we’re eating or the partially hydrogenated oils in our diet. Rather, Whybrow says, it’s the way that corporate America has developed that has increased our stress to levels so high we’re literally making ourselves sick because of it. Americans are suffering ulcers, depression, high blood pressure, anxiety, and cancer at record levels. According to Whybrow, all those promises of more, more, more are actually overloading the reward circuits of our brain. The short-term gains that drive business in America today are actually destroying our health.

Just Because It Works Doesn’t Make It Right
    The danger of manipulations is that they work. And because manipulations work, they have become the norm, practiced by the vast majority of companies and organizations, regardless of size or industry. That fact alone creates a systemic peer pressure. With perfect irony, we, the manipulators, have been manipulated by our own system. With every price drop, promotion, fear-based or aspirational message, and novelty we use to achieve our goals, we find our companies, our organizations and our systems getting weaker and weaker.
    The economic crisis that began in 2008 is just another, albeit extreme, example of what can happen if a flawed assumption is allowed to carry on for too long. The collapse of the housing market and the subsequent collapse of the banking industry were due to decisions made inside the banks based on a series of manipulations. Employees were manipulated with bonuses that encouraged shortsighted decision-making. Open shaming of anyone who spoke out discouraged responsible dissent. A free flow of loans encouraged aspiring homebuyers to buy more than they could afford at all price levels. There was very little loyalty. It was all a series of transactional decisions—effective, but at a high cost. Few were working for the good of the whole. Why would they?—there was no reason given to do so. There was no cause or belief beyond instant gratification. Bankers weren’t the first to be swept up by their own success. American car manufacturers have conducted themselves the same way for decades—manipulation after manipulation, short-term decision built upon short-term decision. Buckling or even collapse is the only logical conclusion when manipulations are the main course of action.
    The reality is, in today’s world, manipulations are the norm.
     
    But there is an alternative.

PART 2
    AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE

3
    THE GOLDEN CIRCLE .

    There are a few leaders who choose to inspire rather than manipulate in order to motivate people. Whether individuals or organizations, every single one of these inspiring leaders thinks, acts and communicates exactly the same way. And it’s the complete opposite of the rest of us. Consciously or not, how they do it is by following a naturally occurring pattern that I call The Golden Circle.
    The concept of The Golden Circle was inspired by the golden ratio—a simple mathematical relationship that has fascinated mathematicians, biologists, architects, artists, musicians and naturists since the beginning of history. From the Egyptians to Pythagoras to Leonardo da Vinci, many have looked to the golden ratio to provide a mathematical formula for proportion and even beauty. It also supports the notion that there is more order in nature than we think, as in the symmetry of leaves and the geometric perfection of snowflakes.
    What I found so attractive about the golden ratio, however, was that it had so many applications in so many fields. And even more significantly, it offered a formula that could produce repeatable and predictable results in