Start With Why

and figures, features and benefits upon which to base our decisions. Companies don’t tell us WHY.
    People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. A failure to communicate WHY creates nothing but stress or doubt. In contrast, many people who are drawn to buy Macintosh computers or Harley-Davidson motorcycles, for example, don’t need to talk to anyone about which brand to choose. They feel the utmost confidence in their decision and the only question they ask is which Mac or which Harley. At that level, the rational features and benefits, facts and figures absolutely matter, but not to drive the decision to give money or loyalty to the company or brand. That decision is already made. The tangible features are simply to help direct the choice of product that best fits our needs. In these cases, the decisions happened in the perfect inside-out order. Those decisions started with WHY—the emotional component of the decision—and then the rational components allowed the buyer to verbalize or rationalize the reasons for their decision.
    This is what we mean when we talk about winning hearts and minds. The heart represents the limbic, feeling part of the brain, and the mind is the rational, language center. Most companies are quite adept at winning minds; all that requires is a comparison of all the features and benefits. Winning hearts, however, takes more work. Given the evidence of the natural order of decision-making, I can’t help but wonder if the order of the expression “hearts and minds” is a coincidence. Why does no one set out to win “minds and hearts”?
    The ability to win hearts before minds is not easy. It’s a delicate balance of art and science—another coincidental grammatical construction. Why is it that things are not a balance of science and art, but always art before science? Perhaps it is a subtle clue our language-impaired limbic brain is sending us to help us see that the art of leading is about following your heart. Perhaps our brains are trying to tell us that WHY must come first.
    Absent a WHY, a decision is harder to make. And when in doubt we look to science, to data, to guide decisions. Companies will tell you that the reason they start with WHAT they do or HOW they do it is because that’s what their customers asked for. Quality. Service. Price. Features. That’s what the data reported. But for the fact that the part of the brain that controls decision-making is different from the part of the brain that is able to report back that decision, it would be a perfectly valid conclusion to give people what they ask for. Unfortunately, there is more evidence that sales don’t significantly increase and bonds of loyalty are not formed simply when companies say or do everything their customers want. Henry Ford summed it up best. “If I had asked people what they wanted,” he said, “they would have said a faster horse.”
    This is the genius of great leadership. Great leaders and great organizations are good at seeing what most of us can’t see. They are good at giving us things we would never think of asking for. When the computer revolution was afoot, computer users couldn’t ask for a graphical user interface. But that’s what Apple gave us. In the face of expanding competition in the airline industry, most air travelers would never have thought to ask for less instead of more. But that’s what Southwest did. And in the face of hard times and overwhelming odds, few would have asked their country, what can I do for you over what can you do for me? The very cause upon which John F. Kennedy introduced his presidency. Great leaders are those who trust their gut. They are those who understand the art before the science. They win hearts before minds. They are the ones who start with WHY.
    We make decisions all day long, and many of them are emotionally driven. Rarely do we sift through all the available information to ensure we know every fact. And we don’t need to. It is all about degrees of certainty. “I can make a decision with 30 percent of the information,” said former secretary of state Colin Powell. “Anything more than 80 percent is too much.” There is always a level at which we trust ourselves or those around us to guide us, and don’t always feel we need all the facts and figures. And sometimes we just may not trust ourselves to make a certain decision yet. This may explain why we feel (there’s that word again) so uncomfortable when others twist our