Start With Why

some people are viscerally drawn to a Ferrari more than a Honda Odyssey says more about the person than the engineering of the product. The engineering, for example, would simply be one of the tangible points that a Ferrari lover could point out to prove how he feels about the car. The dogged defense of the superiority of the Ferrari from the person whose personality is predisposed to favor all the features and benefits of a Ferrari cannot be an objective conversation. Why do you think most people who buy Ferraris are willing to pay a premium to get it in red whereas most who buy Honda Odysseys probably don’t care much about the color at all?
    For all those who will try to convince you that Apple computers are just better, I cannot dispute a single claim. All I can offer is that most of the factors that they believe make them better meet their standard of what a computer should do. With that in mind, Macintoshes are, in practice, only better for those who believe what Apple believes. Those people who share Apple’s WHY believe that Apple’s products are objectively better, and any attempt to convince them otherwise is pointless. Even with objective metrics in hand, the argument about which is better or which is worse without first establishing a common standard creates nothing more than debate. Loyalists for each brand will point to various features and benefits that matter to them (or don’t matter to them) in an attempt to convince the other that they are right. And that’s one of the primary reasons why so many companies feel the need to differentiate in the first place—based on the flawed assumption that only one group can be right. But what if both parties were right? What if an Apple was right for some people and a PC was right for others? It’s not a debate about better or worse anymore, it’s a discussion about different needs. And before the discussion can even happen, the WHYs for each must be established first.
    A simple claim of better, even with the rational evidence to back it up, can create desire and even motivate a decision to buy, but it doesn’t create loyalty. If a customer feels inspired to buy a product, rather than manipulated, they will be able to verbalize the reasons why they think what they bought is better. Good quality and features matter, but they are not enough to produce the dogged loyalty that all the most inspiring leaders and companies are able to command. It is the cause that is represented by the company, brand, product or person that inspires loyalty.

Not the Only Way, Just One Way
    Knowing your WHY is not the only way to be successful, but it is the only way to maintain a lasting success and have a greater blend of innovation and flexibility. When a WHY goes fuzzy, it becomes much more difficult to maintain the growth, loyalty and inspiration that helped drive the original success. By difficult, I mean that manipulation rather than inspiration fast becomes the strategy of choice to motivate behavior. This is effective in the short term but comes at a high cost in the long term.
    Consider the classic business school case of the railroads. In the late 1800s, the railroads were the biggest companies in the country. Having achieved such monumental success, even changing the landscape of America, remembering WHY stopped being important to them. Instead they became obsessed with WHAT they did—they were in the railroad business. This narrowing of perspective influenced their decision-making—they invested all their money in tracks and crossties and engines. But at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new technology was introduced: the airplane. And all those big railroad companies eventually went out of business. What if they had defined themselves as being in the mass transportation business? Perhaps their behavior would have been different. Perhaps they would have seen opportunities that they otherwise missed. Perhaps they would own all the airlines today.
    The comparison raises the question of the long-term survivability of so many other companies that have defined themselves and their industries by WHAT they do. They have been doing it the same way for so long that their ability to compete against a new technology or see a new perspective becomes a daunting task. The story of the railroads has eerie similarities to the case of the music industry discussed earlier. This is another industry that has not done a good job of adjusting its business model to fit a