The Golden Circle offers an explanation for long-term success, but the inherent nature of doing things for the long term often includes investments or short-term costs. This is the reason the discipline to stay focused on the WHY and remain true to your values matters so much.
Consistency of WHAT
Everything you say and everything you do has to prove what you believe. A WHY is just a belief. That’s all it is. HOWs are the actions you take to realize that belief. And WHATs are the results of those actions—everything you say and do: your products, services, marketing, PR, culture and whom you hire. If people don’t buy WHAT you do but WHY you do it, then all these things must be consistent. With consistency people will see and hear, without a shadow of a doubt, what you believe. After all, we live in a tangible world. The only way people will know what you believe is by the things you say and do, and if you’re not consistent in the things you say and do, no one will know what you believe.
It is at the WHAT level that authenticity happens. “Authenticity” is that word so often bandied about in the corporate and political worlds. Everyone talks about the importance of being authentic. “You must be
authentic
,” experts say. “All the trend data shows that people prefer to do business with
authentic
brands.” “People vote for the
authentic
candidate.” The problem is, that instruction is totally unactionable.
How do you go into somebody’s office and say, “From now on, please, a little more authenticity.” “That marketing piece you’re working on,” a CEO might instruct, “please make it a little more authentic.” What do companies do to make their marketing or their sales or whatever they’re doing authentic?
The common solution is hilarious to me. They go out and do customer research and they ask the customers, what would we have to tell you for us to be authentic? This entirely misses the point. You can’t ask others what you have to do to be authentic. Being authentic means that you already know. What does a politician say when told to be “more authentic”? How does a leader act more “authentically”? Without a clear understanding of WHY, the instruction is completely useless.
What authenticity means is that your Golden Circle is in balance. It means that everything you say and everything you do you
actually
believe. This goes for management as well as the employees. Only when that happens can the things you say and do be viewed as authentic. Apple believed that its original Apple computer and its Macintosh challenged the dominant IBM DOS platforms. Apple believes its iPod and iTunes products are challenging the status quo in the music industry. And we all understand WHY Apple does what it does. It is because of that mutual understanding that we view those Apple products as authentic. Dell introduced mp3 players and PDAs in an attempt to enter the small electronics business. We don’t know what Dell’s WHY is, we have no certainty about what the company believes or WHY it produced those products beyond self-gain and a desire to capitalize on a new market segment. Those products are not authentic. It’s not that Dell couldn’t enter other markets—it certainly has the knowledge and ability to make good products—but its ability to do so without a clear understanding of WHY is what makes it much harder and much more expensive. Just producing high-quality products and marketing them does not guarantee success. Authenticity cannot be achieved without clarity of WHY. And authenticity matters.
Ask the best salesmen what it takes to be a great salesman. They will always tell you that it helps when you really believe in the product you’re selling. What does
belief
have to do with a sales job? Simple. When salesmen actually believe in the thing they are selling, then the words that come out of their mouths are authentic. When belief enters the equation, passion exudes from the salesman. It is this authenticity that produces the relationships upon which all the best sales organizations are based. Relationships also build trust. And with trust comes loyalty. Absent a balanced Golden Circle means no authenticity, which means no strong relationships, which means no trust. And you’re back at square one selling on price, service, quality or features. You are back to being like everyone else. Worse, without that authenticity, companies resort to manipulation: pricing, promotions, peer pressure, fear, take your pick. Effective? Of course, but only for the short term.
Being authentic is not a requirement for success, but it is if you want that success to be a lasting success. Again, it goes back to WHY. Authenticity is when you say and do the things you actually believe. But if you don’t know WHY the organization or the products exist on a level beyond WHAT you do, then it is impossible to know if the things you say or do are consistent with your WHY. Without WHY, any attempt at authenticity will almost always be inauthentic.
The Right Order
After you have clarity of WHY, are disciplined and accountable to your own values and guiding principles, and are consistent in all you say and do, the final step is to keep it all in the right order. Just like that little Apple marketing example I used earlier, simply changing the order of the information, starting with WHY, changed the impact of the message. The WHATs are important—they provide the tangible proof of the WHY—but WHY must come first. The WHY provides the context for everything else. As you will see over and over in all the cases and examples in this book, whether in leadership, decision-making or communication, starting with WHY has a profound and long-lasting impact on the result. Starting with WHY is what inspires people to act.
If You Don’t Know WHY, You Can’t Know HOW
Rollin King, a San Antonio businessman, hatched the idea to take what Pacific Southwest was doing in California and bring it to Texas—to start an airline that flew short-haul flights between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. He had recently gone through a long and messy divorce and turned to the one man he trusted to help him get his idea off the ground. His Wild Turkey–drinking, chain-smoking divorce lawyer, Herb Kelleher.
In nearly every way, King and Kelleher were opposites. King, a numbers guy, was notoriously gruff and awkward, while Kelleher was gregarious and likable. At first Kelleher called King’s idea a dumb one, but by the end of the evening King had successfully inspired him with his vision and Kelleher agreed to consider coming on board. It would take four years, however, before Southwest Airlines would make its first flight from Dallas’s Love Field to Houston.
Southwest did not invent the concept of a low-cost airline. Pacific Southwest Airlines pioneered the industry—Southwest even copied their name. Southwest had no first mover’s advantage—Braniff International Airways, Texas International Airlines and Continental Airlines were already serving the Texas market, and none was eager to give up any ground. But Southwest was not built to be an airline. It was built to champion a cause. They just happened to use an airline to do it.
In the early 1970s, only 15 percent of the traveling population traveled by air. At that rate, the market was small enough to scare off most would-be competitors to the big airlines. But Southwest wasn’t interested in competing against everyone else for 15 percent of the traveling population. Southwest cared about the other 85 percent. Back then, if you asked Southwest whom their competition was, they would have told you, “We compete against the car and the bus.” But what they meant was, “We’re the champion for the common man.” That was WHY they started the airline. That was their cause, their purpose, their reason for existing. HOW they went about building their company was not a strategy developed by a high-priced management consultancy. It wasn’t a collection of best practices that they saw other companies doing. Their guiding principles and values stemmed directly from their WHY and were more common sense than anything else.
In the 1970s, air travel was expensive, and if Southwest was going to be the champion for the common man, they had to be cheap. It was an imperative. And in a day and age when air travel was elitist—back then people wore ties on planes—as the champion for the common man, Southwest had to be fun. It was an imperative. In a time when air travel was complicated, with different prices depending on when you booked, Southwest had to be simple. If they were to be accessible to the other 85 percent, then simplicity was an imperative. At the time, Southwest had two price categories: nights/weekends and daytime. That was it.
Cheap, fun and simple. That’s HOW they did it. That’s how they were to champion the cause of the common man. The result of their actions was made tangible in the things they said and did—their product, the people they hired, their culture and their marketing. “You are now free to move about the country,” they said in their advertising. That’s much more than a tagline. That’s a cause. And it’s a cause looking for followers. Those who could relate to Southwest, those who saw themselves as average Joes, now had an alternative to the big airlines. And those who believed what Southwest believed became fiercely loyal to the company. They felt Southwest was a company that spoke directly to them and directly for them. More importantly, they felt that flying Southwest said something about who they were as people. The loyalty that developed with their customers had nothing to do with price. Price was simply one of the ways the airline brought their cause to life.
Howard Putnam, one of 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 they are the cost of entry in business today. It is those visceral limbic feelings that create loyalty. And it is that loyalty that gives Apple or Harley-Davidson or Southwest Airlines or Martin Luther King or any other great leader who commands a following such a huge advantage. Without a strong base of loyal followers, the pressure increases to manipulate—to compete or “differentiate” based on price, quality, service or features. Loyalty, real emotional value, exists in the brain of the buyer, not the seller.