Business & leadership

Start with Why

Simon Sinek

How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

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  • 11 key ideas
  • Text
  • Published 2009

Introduction

Simon Sinek, then a marketing consultant, asked why a few people and organizations, such as Apple, Southwest Airlines, the Wright brothers and Martin Luther King Jr., win a loyalty that others cannot buy. His answer is a simple model he calls the Golden Circle: WHY at the center (a purpose, cause or belief), HOW around it (the values and actions that bring the belief to life) and WHAT on the outside (the products and services, everything an organization says and does). Most organizations communicate from the outside in, starting with what they make. Those who inspire, Sinek argues, work from the inside out: they start with why.

The book came out in 2009, and Sinek's talk on the same idea later became one of the most watched on the TED website. It has fourteen chapters in six parts: a world that relies on manipulation rather than inspiration (chapters 1 and 2); the Golden Circle, the biology Sinek links it to, and the need for clarity, discipline and consistency (3 to 5); how trust and a following grow (6 and 7); how to rally those who believe (8 to 10); why success itself is the biggest challenge (11 and 12); and how to discover a why (13 and 14). The author says the book does not offer a course of action but the cause of action.

Notes. In chapter 4 Sinek writes that the rings of the Golden Circle match the levels of the brain: the neocortex for reasoning and language, the limbic brain for feelings and decisions. This draws on an older model of the brain that neuroscientists today reject; the brain does not keep feeling and reasoning in separate layers. The book also retells the story that Shackleton found his crew through a newspaper advertisement; historians who searched the newspapers of the time found no such advertisement. The company examples describe businesses as they were around 2008.

  1. 1Most organizations rely on manipulations such as price cuts, promotions and fear; they work, but they buy transactions, not loyalty
  2. 2The Golden Circle: inspiring leaders think, act and communicate from the inside out, starting with why
  3. 3Sinek argues that decisions come from feelings and the need to belong, and that facts and features only help us explain them afterwards
  4. 4A why must be clear, the values that carry it must be held with discipline, and everything said and done must be consistent with it
  5. 5Trust grows among people who share values, so organizations should hire people who believe what they believe
  6. 6Leaders do not need to have all the ideas; they give people a cause to work toward and the safety to take risks
  7. 7Wide success comes only after first winning the 15 to 18 percent of people who believe what you believe
  8. 8A visionary needs practical partners to build the vision, and the organization becomes a megaphone that must be clear before it is loud
  9. 9Everything a company does becomes a symbol of what it believes, and the Celery Test checks whether a decision fits its why
  10. 10The biggest challenge is success: as organizations grow, the why goes fuzzy and they split, unless they measure it and hand it on
  11. 11A why is discovered by looking back at your own story, and the real competition is with yourself

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Start with Why by Simon Sinek: summary | Daridanesh