Start With Why

the former presidents of Southwest, likes to tell a story of a senior executive of a large company who approached him after an event. The executive said he always flew one of the big airlines when he traveled on business. He had to, it was a company mandate. And although he had accumulated many frequent flier miles on the other airline and money was no object, when he flew for himself or with his family, he always flew Southwest. “He loves Southwest,” Putnam says with a grin when he tells the story. Just because Southwest is cheap doesn’t mean it only appeals to those with less money. Cheap is just one of the things Southwest does that helps us understand what they believe.
    What Southwest has achieved is the stuff of business folklore. As a result of WHY they do what they do, and because they are highly disciplined in HOW they do it, they are the most profitable airline in history. There has never been a year that they didn’t turn a profit, including after September 11 and during the oil crises of the 1970s and early 2000s. Everything Southwest says and does is authentic. Everything about them reflects the original cause King and Kelleher set out to champion decades earlier. It has never veered.
    Fast-forward about thirty years. United Airlines and Delta Airlines looked at the success of Southwest and decided they needed a low-cost product to compete and share in Southwest’s success. “We got to get us one of those,” they thought. In April 2003, Delta launched their low-cost alternative, Song. Less than a year later United launched Ted. In both cases, they copied HOW Southwest did it. They made Ted and Song cheap, fun and simple. And for anyone who ever flew Ted or Song, they were cheap, they were fun and they were simple. But both failed.
    United and Delta were both old hands in the airline business and were every bit qualified to add whatever products they wanted to adapt to market conditions or seize opportunities. The problem was not with WHAT they did, the problem was, no one knew WHY Song or Ted existed. They may have even been better than Southwest. But it didn’t matter. Sure, people flew them, but there are always reasons people do business with you that have nothing to do with you. That people can be motivated to use your product is not the issue; the problem was that too few were loyal to the brands. Without a sense of WHY, Song and Ted were just another couple of airlines. Without a clear sense of WHY, all that people had to judge them on was price or convenience. They were commodities that had to rely on manipulations to build their businesses, an expensive proposition. United abandoned its entry into the low-cost airline business just four years after it began, and Delta’s Song also took its last flight only four years after it launched.
    It is a false assumption that differentiation happens in HOW and WHAT you do. Simply offering a high-quality product with more features or better service or a better price does not create difference. Doing so guarantees no success. Differentiation happens in WHY and HOW you do it. Southwest isn’t the best airline in the world. Nor are they always the cheapest. They have fewer routes than many of their competition and don’t even fly outside the continental United States. WHAT they do is not always significantly better. But WHY they do it is crystal clear and everything they do proves it. There are many ways to motivate people to do things, but loyalty comes from the ability to inspire people. Only when the WHY is clear and when people believe what you believe can a true loyal relationship develop.

Manipulation and Inspiration Are Similar, but Not the Same
    Manipulation and inspiration both tickle the limbic brain. Aspirational messages, fear or peer pressure all push us to decide one way or another by appealing to our irrational desires or playing on our fears. But it’s when that emotional feeling goes deeper than insecurity or uncertainty or dreams that the emotional reaction aligns with how we view ourselves. It is at that point that behavior moves from being motivated to inspired. When we are inspired, the decisions we make have more to do with who we are and less to do with the companies or the products we’re buying.
    When our decisions feel right, we’re willing to pay a premium or suffer an inconvenience for those products or services. This has nothing to do with price or quality. Price, quality, features and service are important, but