Start With Why

same message as Apple’s “1,000 songs in your pocket.” The difference is Creative told us WHAT their product was and Apple told us WHY we needed it.
    Only later, once we decided we had to have an iPod, did the WHAT matter—and we chose the 5GB version, 10GB version, and so on, the tangible details that proved we could get the 1,000 songs in our pocket. Our decision started with WHY, and so did Apple’s offering.
    How many of us can say with certainty that, indeed, an iPod is actually better than Creative’s Zen? iPods, for example, are still plagued with battery life and battery replacement issues. They tend to just die. Maybe a Zen is better. The reality is, we don’t even care if it is. People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. And it is Apple’s clarity of WHY that gives them such a remarkable ability to innovate, often competing against companies seemingly more qualified than they, and succeed in industries outside their core business.
    The same cannot be said for companies with a fuzzy sense of WHY. When an organization defines itself by WHAT it does, that’s all it will ever be able to do. Apple’s competitors, having defined themselves by their products or services, regardless of their “differentiating value proposition,” are not afforded the same freedom. Gateway, for example, started selling flat-screen TVs in 2003. Having made flat-screen monitors for years, they were every bit as qualified to make and sell TVs. But the company failed to make a credible name for itself among consumer electronics brands and gave up the business two years later to focus on its “core business.” Dell came out with PDAs in 2002 and mp3 players in 2003, but lasted only a few years in each market. Dell makes good-quality products and is fully qualified to produce these other technologies. The problem was they had defined themselves by WHAT they did; they made computers, and it simply didn’t make sense to us to buy a PDA or mp3 player from them. It didn’t feel right. How many people do you think would stand on line for six hours to buy a new cell phone from Dell, as they did for the release of Apple’s iPhone? People couldn’t see Dell as anything more than a computer company. It just didn’t make sense. Poor sales quickly ended Dell’s desire to enter the small electronic goods market; instead they opted to “focus on their core business.” Unless Dell, like so many others, can rediscover their founding purpose, cause or belief and start with WHY in all they say and do, all they will ever do is sell computers. They will be stuck in their “core business.”
    Apple, unlike its competitors, has defined itself by WHY it does things, not WHAT it does. It is not a computer company, but a company that challenges the status quo and offers individuals simpler alternatives. Apple even changed its legal name in 2007 from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple Inc. to reflect the fact that they were more than just a computer company. Practically speaking, it doesn’t really matter what a company’s legal name is. For Apple, however, having the word “Computer” in their name didn’t limit WHAT they could do. It limited how they thought of themselves. The change wasn’t practical, it was philosophical.
    Apple’s WHY was formed at its founding in the late 1970s and hasn’t changed to this date. Regardless of the products they make or the industries into which they migrate, their WHY still remains a constant. And Apple’s intention to challenge accepted thinking has proved prophetic. As a computer company they redirected the course of the personal computing industry. As a small electronics company they have challenged the traditional dominance of companies like Sony and Philips. As a purveyor of mobile phones they pushed the old hands—Motorola, Ericsson, and Nokia—to reexamine their own businesses. Apple’s ability to enter and even dominate so many different industries has even challenged what it means to be a computer company in the first place. Regardless of WHAT it does, we know WHY Apple exists.
    The same cannot be said for their competitors. Although they all had a clear sense of WHY at some point—it was one of the primary factors that helped each of them become billion-dollar companies—over the course of time, all of Apple’s competitors lost their WHY. Now all those companies define themselves by WHAT they do: we make computers. They turned from companies with a cause into companies