start with why Archives

Find Your Why: A Practical Guide to Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team by Simon Sinek. Simon wrote a bestseller in 2009 called Start with Why.

This book is the workshop companion. It will certainly not stand alone without the original. Find Your Why is above all, lead by Simon, David Mead, and Peter Docker as a corporate workshop now part of Simon’s consulting company Sinek Partners.

In this book the authors walk through specific points to identify “Why”for teams and organizations.

At the same time, Find Your Why is positioned to be an anchor for a workgroup moderator. So again, without reading Start with Why, your organization will struggle with Find Your Why as a stand alone book.

However, I found Start with Why to be compelling so I eagerly absorbed how this companion book can bolster teams and organizations. At various points throughout the book I could forecast how this would be received by my organization and others during a pandemic, when everything was changing rapidly in the opening weeks of remote work.

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek helps identify an idea of a ‘golden circle’ in three consecutive rings. The Why, How, and What provide a foundation to show certain stories are successful. When measuring ‘why’ they succeeded against, in some cases overwhelming odds.

Simon acknowledges that many talented companies make good products. But they are also a short term success story. Simon shows how Tivo fits this example.

But only a few really understand ‘the why’ that makes their efforts timeless. These groups (or individuals) succeed beyond all expectations. Focusing on your purpose and cause you cannot only find success, but also differentiate yourself.

Above all, Simon’s story of the Wright Brothers success is a key example of ‘Why’ matters. Simon provides a vivid example of achieving success based upon the Golden Circle.

Samuel Langley worked to become the first man to fly an airplane. He was very qualified to tackle this challenge. In 1880 he invent the Bolometer. Langley was a professor of mathematics at the Naval Academy. He also worked at Harvard University. By the late 1880s, Langley was a senior officer at the Smithsonian Institution. Then the US War Department funded ($50,000 grant) his airplane project. Langley assembled a team of very talented engineers. Even Alexander Gram Bell followed Langley and photographed early test flights. So by all accounts he was gong to be the first to fly a plane.