Start With Why

spend all that time sifting through the pros and cons, listening to all the differences between plasma or LCD, Dell versus HP.
    When we make gut decisions, the highest level of confidence we can offer is, “The decision feels right,” even if it flies in the face of all the facts and figures. Again, this is biologically accurate, because gut decisions happen in the part of the brain that controls our emotions, not language. Ask the most successful entrepreneurs and leaders what their secret is and invariably they all say the same thing: “I trust my gut.” The times things went wrong, they will tell you, “I listened to what others were telling me, even though it didn’t feel right. I should have trusted my gut.” It’s a good strategy, except it’s not scalable. The gut decision can only be made by a single person. It’s a perfectly good strategy for an individual or a small organization, but what happens when success necessitates that more people be able to make decisions that feel right?
    That’s when the power of WHY can be fully realized. The ability to put a WHY into words provides the emotional context for decisions. It offers greater confidence than “I think it’s right.” It’s more scalable than “I feel it’s right.” When you know your WHY, the highest level of confidence you can offer is, “I know it’s right.” When you know the decision is right, not only does it feel right, but you can also rationalize it and easily put it into words. The decision is fully balanced. The rational WHATs offer proof for the feeling of WHY. If you can verbalize the feeling that drove the gut decision, if you can clearly state your WHY, you’ll provide a clear context for those around you to understand why that decision was made. If the decision is consistent with the facts and figures, then those facts and figures serve to reinforce the decision—this is balance. And if the decision flies in the face of all the facts and figures then it will highlight the other factors that need to be considered. It can turn a controversial decision from a debate into a discussion.
    My former business partner, for example, would get upset when I turned away business. I would tell him that a potential client didn’t “feel” right. That would frustrate him to no end because “the client’s money was as good as everyone else’s,” he would tell me. He couldn’t understand the reason for my decision and, worse, I couldn’t explain it. It was just a feeling I had. In contrast, these days I can easily explain WHY I’m in business—to inspire people to do the things that inspire them. If I were to make the same decision now for the same gut reason, there is no debate because everyone is clear WHY the decision was made. We turn away business because those potential clients don’t believe what we believe and they are not interested in anything to do with inspiring people. With a clear sense of WHY, a debate to take on a bad-fit client turns into a discussion of whether the imbalance is worth the short-term gain they may give us.
    The goal of business should not be to do business with anyone who simply wants what you have. It should be to focus on the people who believe what you believe. When we are selective about doing business only with those who believe in our WHY, trust emerges.

PART 3
    LEADERS NEED A FOLLOWING

6
    THE EMERGENCE OF TRUST
    To say that most of the company’s employees were embarrassed to work there was an understatement. It was no secret that the employees felt mistreated. And if a company mistreats their people, just watch how the employees treat their customers. Mud rolls down a hill, and if you’re the one standing at the bottom, you get hit with the full brunt. In a company, that’s usually the customer. Throughout the 1980s, this was life at Continental Airlines—the worst airline in the industry.
    “I could see Continental’s biggest problem the second I walked in the door in February of 1994,” Gordon Bethune wrote in From Worst to First , the chief executive’s firsthand account of Continental’s turnaround. “It was a crummy place to work.” Employees were “surly to customers, surly to each other, and ashamed of their company. And you can’t have a good product without people who like coming to work. It just can’t be done,” he recounts.
    Herb Kelleher, the head of Southwest for twenty years, was considered a heretic for positing the notion that it is a company’s