Start With Why

Langley paid for talent to help him get rich and famous. The Wright brothers started with WHY. Further proof Langley was motivated by WHAT, a few days after Orville and Wilbur took flight, Langley quit. He got out of the business. He could have said, “That’s amazing, now I’m going to improve upon their technology.” But he didn’t. He found the defeat humiliating—his own test flight had landed in the Potomac River, and the newspapers all made fun of him. He cared so much about what others thought of him, he was so preoccupied with becoming famous. He wasn’t first, so he simply quit.

Innovation Happens at the Edges
    Dream teams are not always so dreamy. When a team of experts comes together they often work for themselves and not for the good of the whole. This is what happens when companies feel the need to pay mega-salaries to “get the best talent.” Those people are not necessarily showing up because they believe in your WHY, they are showing up for the money. A classic manipulation. Paying someone a lot of money and asking them to come up with great ideas ensures very little. However, pulling together a team of like-minded people and giving them a cause to pursue ensures a greater sense of teamwork and camaraderie. Langley pulled together a dream team and promised them riches. The Wright brothers inspired a group of people to join them in pursuit of something bigger than each member of the team. Average companies give their people something to work on. In contrast, the most innovative organizations give their people something to work toward.
    The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen. It is the people inside the company, those on the front lines, who are best qualified to find new ways of doing things. The people who answer the phones and talk to customers, for example, can tell you more about the kinds of questions they get than can anyone sitting in an executive suite miles away. If the people inside a company are told to come to work and just do their job, that’s all they will do. If they are constantly reminded WHY the company was founded and told to always look for ways to bring that cause to life while performing their job, however, then they will do more than their job.
    Steve Jobs, for example, did not personally come up with the iPod or iTunes or the iPhone. Others inside the company did. Jobs gave people a filter, a context, a higher purpose around which to innovate: find existing status-quo industries, those in which companies fight to protect their old-fashioned business models, and challenge them. This is WHY Apple was founded, it is what Jobs and Wozniak did when they started the company, and it is what Apple’s people and products have done ever since. It’s a repeating pattern. Apple’s employees simply look for ways to bring their cause to life in as many places as they can. And it works.
    It is not the same at many other companies. Companies that define themselves by WHAT they do instead of WHY they do it instruct their people to be innovative around a product or service. “Make it better,” they are instructed. Those who work for Apple’s competitors, companies that have defined themselves as “computer manufacturers,” come to work to develop “more innovative” computers. The best they can do is add more RAM, add a feature or two, or, as one PC maker has done, give people the option to customize the color of their computer casing. This hardly qualifies as an idea with the potential to change the course of an industry. A nice feature, for sure, but not innovation. If you are curious as to how Colgate finds itself with thirty-two different types of toothpaste today, it is because every day its people come to work to develop a better toothpaste and not, for example, to look for ways to help people feel more confident about themselves.
    Apple does not have a lock on good ideas; there are smart, innovative thinkers at most companies. But great companies give their people a purpose or challenge around which to develop ideas rather than simply instruct them to make a better mousetrap. Companies that study their competitors in hopes of adding the features and benefits that will make their products “better” are only working to entrench the company in WHAT it does. Companies with a clear sense of WHY tend to ignore their competition, whereas those with a fuzzy sense of