Start With Why

order of the information, starting with WHY, changed the impact of the message. The WHATs are important—they provide the tangible proof of the WHY—but WHY must come first. The WHY provides the context for everything else. As you will see over and over in all the cases and examples in this book, whether in leadership, decision-making or communication, starting with WHY has a profound and long-lasting impact on the result. Starting with WHY is what inspires people to act.

If You Don’t Know WHY, You Can’t Know HOW
    Rollin King, a San Antonio businessman, hatched the idea to take what Pacific Southwest was doing in California and bring it to Texas—to start an airline that flew short-haul flights between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. He had recently gone through a long and messy divorce and turned to the one man he trusted to help him get his idea off the ground. His Wild Turkey–drinking, chain-smoking divorce lawyer, Herb Kelleher.
    In nearly every way, King and Kelleher were opposites. King, a numbers guy, was notoriously gruff and awkward, while Kelleher was gregarious and likable. At first Kelleher called King’s idea a dumb one, but by the end of the evening King had successfully inspired him with his vision and Kelleher agreed to consider coming on board. It would take four years, however, before Southwest Airlines would make its first flight from Dallas’s Love Field to Houston.
    Southwest did not invent the concept of a low-cost airline. Pacific Southwest Airlines pioneered the industry—Southwest even copied their name. Southwest had no first mover’s advantage—Braniff International Airways, Texas International Airlines and Continental Airlines were already serving the Texas market, and none was eager to give up any ground. But Southwest was not built to be an airline. It was built to champion a cause. They just happened to use an airline to do it.
    In the early 1970s, only 15 percent of the traveling population traveled by air. At that rate, the market was small enough to scare off most would-be competitors to the big airlines. But Southwest wasn’t interested in competing against everyone else for 15 percent of the traveling population. Southwest cared about the other 85 percent. Back then, if you asked Southwest whom their competition was, they would have told you, “We compete against the car and the bus.” But what they meant was, “We’re the champion for the common man.” That was WHY they started the airline. That was their cause, their purpose, their reason for existing. HOW they went about building their company was not a strategy developed by a high-priced management consultancy. It wasn’t a collection of best practices that they saw other companies doing. Their guiding principles and values stemmed directly from their WHY and were more common sense than anything else.
    In the 1970s, air travel was expensive, and if Southwest was going to be the champion for the common man, they had to be cheap. It was an imperative. And in a day and age when air travel was elitist—back then people wore ties on planes—as the champion for the common man, Southwest had to be fun. It was an imperative. In a time when air travel was complicated, with different prices depending on when you booked, Southwest had to be simple. If they were to be accessible to the other 85 percent, then simplicity was an imperative. At the time, Southwest had two price categories: nights/weekends and daytime. That was it.
    Cheap, fun and simple. That’s HOW they did it. That’s how they were to champion the cause of the common man. The result of their actions was made tangible in the things they said and did—their product, the people they hired, their culture and their marketing. “You are now free to move about the country,” they said in their advertising. That’s much more than a tagline. That’s a cause. And it’s a cause looking for followers. Those who could relate to Southwest, those who saw themselves as average Joes, now had an alternative to the big airlines. And those who believed what Southwest believed became fiercely loyal to the company. They felt Southwest was a company that spoke directly to them and directly for them. More importantly, they felt that flying Southwest said something about who they were as people. The loyalty that developed with their customers had nothing to do with price. Price was simply one of the ways the airline brought their cause to life.
    Howard Putnam, one of