Start With Why

“corporation”; they were one of those before the love started to decline. What has changed is that their WHY went fuzzy. And we all know it. A company once so loved is simply not as loved anymore. The negative feelings we have for the company are real, but the part of the brain that is able to explain why we feel so negatively toward them has trouble explaining what changed. So we rationalize and point to the most tangible things we can see—size and money. If we, as outsiders, have lost clarity of Wal-Mart’s WHY, it’s a good sign that the WHY has gone fuzzy inside the company also. If it’s not clear on the inside, it will never be clear on the outside. What is clear is that the Wal-Mart of today is not the Wal-Mart that Sam Walton built. So what happened?
    It’s too easy to say that all they care about is their bottom line. All companies are in business to make money, but being successful at it is not the reason why things change so drastically. That only points to a symptom. Without understanding the reason it happened in the first place, the pattern will repeat for every other company that makes it big. It is not destiny or some mystical business cycle that transforms successful companies into impersonal goliaths. It’s people.

Being Successful vs. Feeling Successful
    Every year a group of high-performing entrepreneurs get together at MIT’s Endicott House just outside Boston. This Gathering of Titans, as they call themselves, is not your average entrepreneurial conference. It’s not a boondoggle. There’s no golf, there’s no spa and there are no expensive dinners. Every year forty to fifty business owners spend four days listening, from early in the morning until well into the evening. An assortment of guest speakers is invited to present their thinking and ideas, and then there are discussions led by some of the attendees.
    I had the honor of attending the Gathering of Titans as a guest a few years ago. I expected it to be another group of entrepreneurs getting together to talk shop. I expected to hear discussions and presentations about maximizing profits and improving systems. But what I witnessed was profoundly different. In fact, it was the complete opposite.
    On the first day, someone asked the group how many of them had achieved their financial goals. About 80 percent of the hands went up. I thought that alone was quite impressive. But it was the answer to the next question that was so profound. With their hands still in the air, the group was then asked, “How many of you feel successful?” And 80 percent of the hands went down.
    Here was a room full of some of America’s brightest entrepreneurs, many of them multimillionaires, some of whom don’t need to work anymore if they don’t want to, yet most of them still didn’t feel like they had succeeded. In fact, many of them reported that they’d lost something since they started their businesses. They reminisced about the days when they didn’t have any money and were working out of their basements, trying to get things going. They longed for the feeling they used to have.
    These amazing entrepreneurs were at a point in their lives where they realized that their businesses were about much more than selling stuff or making money. They realized the deep personal connection that existed between WHAT they do and WHY they were doing it. This group of entrepreneurs gathered to discuss matters of WHY, and at times it was quite intense.
    Unlike the typical Type-A-personality entrepreneurs, the Titans were not there to prove anything to each other. There was a feeling of immense trust rather than ruthless competition. And because of this feeling, every member of the group was willing to express vulnerability that they probably rarely let show the rest of the year. Over the course of the event, every person in the room would shed a tear or two at least once.
    It doesn’t interest me to write about the idea that money doesn’t buy happiness, or in this case, the feeling of success. This is neither profound nor a new idea. What does interest me, however, is the transition that these entrepreneurs went through. As their companies grew, and they became more and more successful, what changed?
    It is easy to see what they gained over the course of their careers—we can easily count the money, the size of the office, the number of employees, the size of their homes, market share and the number of press clippings. But the thing they had lost is