Start With Why

driving purpose, cause or belief—never changes. If our Golden Circle is in balance, WHAT we do is simply the tangible way we find to breathe life into that cause. Developing software was merely one of the things Bill Gates did to bring his cause to life. An airline gave Herb Kelleher the perfect outlet to spread his belief in freedom. Putting a man on the moon was one goal John F. Kennedy used to rally people to bring to life his belief that service to the nation—and not being serviced by the nation—would lead America to advance and prosper. Apple gave Steve Jobs a way to challenge the status quo and do something big in the world. All the things these charismatic leaders did were the tangible ways they found to bring their WHYs to life. But none of them could have imagined WHAT they would be doing when they were young.
    When a WHY is clear, those who share that belief will be drawn to it and maybe want to take part in bringing it to life. If that belief is amplified it can have the power to rally even more believers to raise their hands and declare, “I want to help.” With a group of believers all rallying around a common purpose, cause or belief, amazing things can happen. But it takes more than inspiration to become great. Inspiration only starts the process; you need something more to drive a movement.

Amplify the Source of Inspiration
    The Golden Circle is not just a communication tool; it also provides some insight into how great organizations are organized. As we start to add dimension to the concept of The Golden Circle, it is no longer helpful to look at it as a purely two-dimensional model. If it is to provide any real value in how to build a great organization in our very three-dimensional world, The Golden Circle needs to be three-dimensional. The good news is, it is. It is, in fact, a top-down view of a cone. Turn it on its side and you can see its full value.

    The cone represents a company or an organization—an inherently hierarchical and organized system. Sitting at the top of the system, representing the WHY, is a leader; in the case of a company, that’s usually the CEO (or at least we hope it is). The next level down, the HOW level, typically includes the senior executives who are inspired by the leader’s vision and know HOW to bring it to life. Don’t forget that a WHY is just a belief, HOWs are the actions we take to realize that belief and WHATs are the results of those actions. No matter how charismatic or inspiring the leader is, if there are not people in the organization inspired to bring that vision to reality, to build an infrastructure with systems and processes, then at best, inefficiency reigns, and at worst, failure results.
    In this rendering the HOW level represents a person or a small group responsible for building the infrastructure that can make a WHY tangible. That may happen in marketing, operations, finance, human resources and all the other C-suite departments. Beneath that, at the WHAT level, is where the rubber meets the road. It is at this level that the majority of the employees sit and where all the tangible stuff actually happens.

I Have a Dream (and He’s Got the Plan)
    Dr. King said he had a dream, and he inspired people to make his dream their own. What Ralph Abernathy lent the movement was something else: he knew what it would take to realize that dream, and he showed people HOW to do it. He gave the dream structure. Dr. King spoke about the philosophical implications of the movement, while Abernathy, Dr. King’s onetime mentor, longtime friend and financial secretary and treasurer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, would help people understand the specific steps they needed to take. “Now,” Abernathy would tell the audience following a rousing address by Dr. King, “let me tell you what that means for tomorrow morning.”
    Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the leader, but he didn’t change America alone. Though Dr. King inspired the movement, to actually move people requires organizing. As is the case with almost all great leaders, there were others around Dr. King who knew better HOW to do that. For every great leader, for every WHY-type, there is an inspired HOW-type or group of HOW-types who take the intangible cause and build the infrastructure that can give it life. That infrastructure is what actually makes any measurable change or success possible.
    The leader sits at the top of the cone—at the start, the point of